Learning and memory of odor-reward association: selective impairment following horizontal diagonal band lesions

Rats with horizontal diagonal band of Broca (HDBB) lesions were trained in a successive-cue olfactory discrimination using different intertrial intervals (ITIs). They learned the paradigm of the task, but substantial impairment in performance of odor-reward associations was observed when the ITIs were longer than 15 s. They performed as well as control animals with short ITIs when they were trained previously with long ITIs, but forgetting appeared very soon thereafter (24 hr later). The finding is that the HDBB is an essential relay between the hippocampal system and the olfactory cortex: The HDBB allows associative memory storage when a limited-duration short-memory system located elsewhere is overloaded.