Anterior rhinal cortex and amygdala: Dissociation of their contributions to memory and food preference in rhesus monkeys

Rhesus monkeys were trained on 2 versions of delayed nonmatching-to-sample, one with multiple pairs of objects and the other with a single pair, to evaluate their ability to remember objects. They then received either bilateral aspiration lesions of the anterior rhinal cortex or bilateral excitotoxic lesions of the amygdala, or were retained as unoperated controls. On re-presentation of the multiple-pair task, monkeys with anterior rhinal cortex lesions failed to show the improvement observed in both other groups in remembering the objects over delay intervals ranging from 10 to 60 s. Also, monkeys with anterior rhinal cortex lesions were impaired relative to the controls in relearning the single-pair version of the task. Conversely, on a formal test of food preference, monkeys with amygdala lesions showed abnormal patterns of food choice, whereas monkeys with anterior rhinal cortex lesions did not. Visual memory impairments formerly attributed to amygdala damage are probably due to the rhinal cortex damage associated with aspiration lesions of the amygdala.