Costa, Bueno e Xavier (2005) showed that rats with hippocampus dentate gyrus lesions produced by colchicine have post-surgical tests deficits in spatial tasks involving conditional discrimination (non-matching-to-place, NMTP), although repetitive training does promote the recovery of the lamed subject's performance. The purpose of this experiment was to assess the performance of rats with selective lesions of dentate gyrus induced by neonatal ionizing radiation in the NMTP task. The irradiated group showed deficits in the first training sessions when compared to the control group. Nevertheless, the performance of lesion and control groups was similar at the end of the sessions, as previously reported. The results are discussed in light of the cognitive map theory.
Ionizing radiation; spatial discrimination; NMTP task acquisition; hippocampus; dentate gyrus
