Dorsal striatum and stimulus-response learning: lesions of the dorsolateral, but not dorsomedial, striatum impair acquisition of a stimulus-response-based instrumental discrimination task, while sparing conditioned place preference learning.

While some evidence suggests that the dorsal striatum is important for stimulus-response learning, disagreement exists about the relative contribution of the dorsolateral and dorsomedial striatum to this form of learning. In the present experiment, the effects of lesions of the dorsolateral and dorsomedial striatum were investigated on two tasks that differentially require the development of stimulus-response learning. The first task utilized an operant conditional discrimination task, which is likely to rely heavily upon stimulus-response learning. The second task looked conditioned place preference learning, a task that is unlikely to require the development of stimulus-response associations. Animals with lesions of the dorsolateral striatum were impaired on the operant conditional discrimination task, but retained the ability to learn the conditioned place preference task. In contrast, animals with lesions of the dorsomedial striatum were not found to be impaired on either task used in the present experiment. These results suggest that the dorsolateral striatum is necessary for the successful acquisition of tasks that place a demand upon stimulus-response learning, while the dorsomedial striatum is not involved in this type of learning.