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Published on: April 24, 2009
Dissociating the role of the parietal cortex and dorsal hippocampus for spatial information processing
Naomi J Goodrich-Hunsaker1, Michael R Hunsaker, Raymond P Kesner
1Department of Psychology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA.
Abstract:
Dorsal hippocampus, parietal cortex, and control lesioned rats were tested on both a metric and topological task. The metric task consisted of 2 different objects placed 68 cm apart on a cheese board. After habituation, the objects were moved to a separation of 38 cm on Day 1 and to a separation of 98 cm on Day 2. The topological task consisted of 4 different objects placed in a square orientation. After habituation, the first 2 objects were switched, and after the rats habituated to that change, the back 2 objects were switched. This was repeated on a different day with 4 new objects. The data suggest that the hippocampus is necessary for metric representations, whereas the parietal cortex is necessary for topological representations.
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