Impaired object recognition with increasing levels of feature ambiguity in rats with perirhinal cortex lesions

It has been proposed that the perirhinal cortex is involved in the representation of the characteristics of objects. In particular it has been proposed that it is critical for discriminating between stimuli which have some features in common and thus it has been described as being involved in resolving feature ambiguity. The present experiments demonstrate that lesions of perirhinal cortex in the rat cause impairments in object recognition which increase with the level of feature ambiguity present in the discrimination. Although increasing feature ambiguity increases the overall difficulty of discriminations, lesions of the perirhinal cortex resulted in a disproportionate impairment when feature ambiguity was increased and not when the difficulty of the discrimination was increased through enlargement of the stimulus set. The present experiments therefore support the view that perirhinal cortex in the rat is critical to resolution of feature ambiguity in stimulus specification.