Abstract
Thirty-seven intact cats, 20 with lesions in posterior association cortex, 8 with ablations of auditory and 9 with ablations of visual projection cortex learned to approach a compound stimulus, noise plus lights, for food. Two different procedures investigated whether one or both elements had come to control the cats’ behavior. When the noise or light were presented singly, the group with auditory cortex damage was more successful on light trials; the other groups responded more frequently to noise. When noise and light were opposed by simultaneous presentation at different loci, the cats with injuries to auditory cortex preferred the visual stimulus. The other groups responded more frequently to noise. Lesions in the auditory cortex appear to reduce attention to discriminable acoustic signals, and to reverse cats’ ordinarily strong preference for auditory over visual cues. This result is consonant with views that postulate nonsensory functions for projection cortices. We speculate that similar results were not obtained from the cats with damage to visual cortex because of a ceiling effect. Removal of posterior association cortex had no discernible effect upon performance in this experiment unless the lesion included inferior temporal cortex. Thus the idea that the extramarginal cortex is critical for intermodality learning in a general sense was not supported.
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This research was supported by Grant MH-04726 from the National Institute of Mental Health. The authors thank James Corwin and James Spivey for critical reviews of the manuscript.
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Nonneman, A.J., Warren, J.M. Two-cue learning by brain-damaged cats. Psychobiology 5, 397–402 (1977). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03337843
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03337843