Dissociation between the effects of damage to perirhinal cortex and area TE

Perirhinal cortex and area TE are immediately adjacent to each other in the temporal lobe and reciprocally interconnected. These areas are thought to lie at the interface between visual perception and visual memory, but it has been unclear what their separate contributions might be. In three experiments, monkeys with bilateral lesions of the perirhinal cortex exhibited a different pattern of impairment than monkeys with bilateral lesions of area TE. In experiment 1, lesions of the perirhinal cortex produced a multimodal deficit in recognition memory (delayed nonmatching to sample), whereas lesions of area TE impaired performance only in the visual modality. In experiment 2, on a test of visual recognition memory (the visual paired comparison task) lesions of the perirhinal cortex impaired performance at long delays but spared performance at a very short delay. In contrast, lesions of area TE impaired performance even at the short delay. In experiment 3, lesions of the perirhinal cortex and lesions of area TE produced an opposite pattern of impairment on two visual discrimination tasks, simple object discrimination learning (impaired only by perirhinal lesions), and concurrent discrimination learning (impaired only by TE lesions). Taken together, the findings suggest that the perirhinal cortex, like other medial temporal lobe structures, is important for the formation of memory, whereas area TE is important for visual perceptual processing.