The formation of mate recognition memory in mice is associated with neural changes at the reciprocal dendrodendritic synapses between glutamatergic mitral cell (MC) projection neurons and GABAergic granule cell (GC) interneurons in the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB). Although noradrenaline (NA) plays a critical role in the formation of the memory,…

Conditioned odor avoidance (COA) results from the association between a novel odor and a delayed visceral illness. The present experiments investigated the role of the basolateral amygdala (BLA) in acquisition and retrieval of COA memory. To address this, we used the GABAA agonist muscimol to temporarily inactivate the BLA during COA acquisition…

Visual discrimination tasks are increasingly used to explore the neurobiology of vision in rodents, but it remains unclear how the animals solve these tasks: Do they process shapes holistically, or by using low-level features such as luminance and angle acuity? In the present study we found that when discriminating triangles from squares, rats did…

Two experiments examined the effects of reductions in cortical cholinergic function on performance of a novel task that allowed for the simultaneous assessment of attention to a visual stimulus and memory for that stimulus over a variable delay within the same test session. In the first experiment, infusions of the muscarinic receptor antagonist…