Summary
The experiments described here used an experimental design in which each rat was presented simultaneously with different discriminations, allowing a within-subject, within-test dissociation of performance. The results demonstrate that the rats with fimbriafornix lesions showed a greater impairment in the discriminations requiring working memory than in discriminations requiring only reference memory. This dissociation rules out a variety of different interpretations of the behavioral impairment in the working memory discrimination and provides strong support for the idea that these lesions produce a selective difficulty in processing the temporal/personal context of the information to be remembered. Because the details of the experiments have been presented elsewhere, the emphasis here is on the concepts behind the experiments, the implications of the results, and the relationship of the results to different theories of memory.
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Olton, D.S. (1982). Hippocampal Function and Memory Processes. In: Woody, C.D. (eds) Conditioning. Advances in Behavioral Biology, vol 26. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-0701-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-0701-4_8
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