Critical determinants of nonspatial working memory deficits in rats with conventional lesions of the hippocampus or fornix.

Rats with conventional lesions of the hippocampus or fornix were compared postoperatively with controls on nonspatial memory tasks. Neither lesion impaired delayed matching-to-sample (DMS) performance in a discrete-trial task involving "pseudo-trial-unique" complex stimuli. An impairment emerged if a single pair of complex stimuli was used throughout each day's session, and the greatest impairment was obtained with the use of a single pair of less complex stimuli throughout each day's test. Transfer to a continuous DMS task with no explicit intertrial interval produced a different pattern because both lesion and control levels of performance were depressed when two complex stimuli were used repeatedly. A final, separate discrimination learning experiment showed that hippocampectomized rats readily discriminated between the stimuli associated with the greatest lesion-induced DMS deficit. Hippocampal dysfunction thus produces clear deficits on non-spatial memory tasks under appropriate test conditions.