Systems neuroscienceThe primate amygdala and reinforcement: A dissociation between rule-based and associatively-mediated memory revealed in neuronal activity
Section snippets
Subjects, stimulus presentation, behavioral responses, and reinforcement
Two rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) were used in this study and were trained on a visual discrimination task with stimuli that were always rewarded or punished, and on a recognition memory task. They performed these tasks with many hundreds of trials per day, five days a week, for periods of up to 14 months. When sitting in the primate chair the monkeys’ view of the laboratory was limited to a circular aperture in an enclosure that surrounded the chair. Head support and the enclosure ensured
Results
A total of 659 neurons in 92 electrode penetrations were recorded in three hemispheres of two monkeys. The classification of all recorded neurons is found in Table 1. [The ten neurons in row 3 of Table 1 with responses only to novel stimuli have been described by Wilson and Rolls (1993)]. Of the 659 neurons shown in Table 1, for 17 neurons it was possible to show that they had visual responses, discriminated between the reward- and punishment-associated stimuli in the Go/NoGo visual
Amygdala neurons and associations between visual stimuli and primary reinforcers
The present results show the following. First, a population of amygdala neurons responds differentially to rewarding and aversive stimuli in a visual discrimination task with which the monkeys have had many thousands of trials of experience. This population of neurons typically responds more to the S+ than the S−. This confirms the finding of Sanghera et al. (1979), and the data of Nishijo et al. (1988) are consistent with this. The fact that there are many amygdala neurons that respond more to
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by a Medical Research Council Programme Grant to E. T. Rolls.
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Present address: Kunming Institute of Zoology, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, 32 Jiaochang Donglu, Kunming, Yunnan 650223, P.R. China. E-mail address: [email protected] (F. A. W. Wilson).