Forebrain commissures and visual memory: a new approach

The primary purpose of these exploratory experiments was to determine: (1) whether the forebrain commissures can provide full accessibility of the mnemonic store to either hemisphere when the taks involves memory for 'events' (images) rather than, as in essentially all previous tests on split-brain animals, memory for 'rules' (discrimination habits); and (2) whether the anterior commissure (AC) alone is capable of such function. Macaques, with optic chiasm transected to allow limitation of direct visual input to one or the other hemisphere, were trained on tasks requiring recognition of previously viewed photographic slides. For one task, delayed-matching-to-sample (DMTS), the animal was presented with a 'sample' image, and then 0-15s later was required to choose that image in preference to a second image concurrently displayed. On the other task, running recognition (RR), a series of images was presented, some of which were repetitions of images previously seen in that session, and the animal was required to signal its recognition of these repetitions. For either task the initial presentation could be made to one eye and hemisphere, and subsequent recognition required of the other. In such circumstance, if all forebrain commissures were divided, such interhemispheric recognition was no longer possible. For the DMTS task if either the AC or 5 mm of the splenium of the corpus callosum were available, interhemispheric recognition was basically equivalent to that using the same eye and hemisphere. However, interhemispheric accuracy with the RR task, while well above chance levels, was consistently inferior to that achieved intrahemispherically when complex scenes or objects were viewed. This is probably a consequence mostly of the differing visual fields of the two eyes, since interhemispheric accuracy was greatly improved by use of images having approximately identical right and left halves. No consistent hemispheric specialization nor difference in direction of interhemispheric communication was observed despite the use of different types of material and the different mnemonic tasks. It is concluded that the AC in macaques can achieve full and continuously operative neural unification of the mnemonic traces of past experience.