Ventral striatum lesions do not affect reinforcement learning with deterministic outcomes on slow time scales

A large body of work has implicated the ventral striatum (VS) in aspects of reinforcement learning (RL). However, less work has directly examined the effects of lesions in the VS, or other forms of inactivation, on 2-armed bandit RL tasks. We have recently found that lesions in the VS in macaque monkeys affect learning with stochastic schedules but have minimal effects with deterministic schedules. The reasons for this are not currently clear. Because our previous work used short intertrial intervals, one possibility is that the animals were using working memory to bridge stimulus-reward associations from 1 trial to the next. In the present study, we examined learning of 60 pairs of objects, in which the animals received only 1 trial per day with each pair. The large number of object pairs and the long interval (approximately 24 hr) between trials with a given pair minimized the chances that the animals could use working memory to bridge trials. We found that monkeys with VS lesions were unimpaired relative to controls, which suggests that animals with VS lesions can still learn to select rewarded objects even when they cannot make use of working memory. (PsycINFO Database Record