Cognitive task performance after lidocaine-induced inactivation of different sites within the basolateral amygdala...

To determine whether discrete components of amygdaloid and striatal memory systems could interact to guide behavior in a radial arm maze, conditioned cue preference (CCP) and win-stay accuracy were examined after lidocaine inactivation of either the rostral (rBLA) or caudal (cBLA) basolateral amygdala, the lateral (lDST) or medial (mDST) dorsal striatum, or a control site in rats. CCP expression was blocked only after rBLA or cBLA inactivation. lDST inactivation prevented attainment of criteria win-stay performance, whereas rBLA and mDST inactivation delayed it. Control site inactivation did not influence performance in either task. These findings suggest that the amygdala works independently of other memory systems to regulate learned responses in the CCP task, the rBLA may work cooperatively with the lDST to guide behavior in the win-stay task, and the mDST is less critical than the lDST for attaining criteria performance in the win-stay task.