Impaired learning and decreased cortical norepinephrine after bilateral locus coeruleus lesions.

Bilateral lesions of the nucleus locus coeruleus in rats deplete the cerebral cortex of norepinephrine and significantly diminish the rate of increase of running for food reward in a simple L-shaped runway. As assessed in this situation, learning was absent in those rats with the most complete ablations of the locus coeruleus, although these rats showed normal weight gain and normal motor and exploratory activity.