Abstract
An attempt was made to reduce the deficit produced by a septal and/or fornical lesion on the 3-table reasoning task through the addition of a visual cue. This procedure has previously been used to ameliorate deficits produced by these lesions in a variety of instrumental tasks. When the cue was used to indicate a particular location it had no effect on performance. When the cue was used to indicate the presence and location of food, the performance of fornically damaged subjects improved and the performance of control subjects dropped. However, the performances of both groups were comparable to levels achieved when the task was made into a discriminative learning situation. These results emphasize the qualitative distinction between spatial integration and spatial discrimination performance and gives support to the suggestion that the fornix is involved in spatial integration processes. On the other hand, the performance of septal-lesioned subjects was unaffected by the addition of the cue, suggesting a more severe deficit than loss of spatial integrative ability.
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Herrmann, T., Black, A.H., Doherty, D. et al. Visual cues fail to attenuate deficits on a spatial-integration task following septal or fornical damage. Psychobiology 8, 29–32 (1980). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03326443
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03326443