Selective cholinergic denervation of the cingulate cortex impairs the acquisition and performance of a conditional visual discrimination in rats.

Results from excitotoxic lesion studies have implicated the cingulate cortex and its basal forebrain afferents in the acquisition and performance of conditional discrimination tasks. In the present work, we sought to clarify the role of specifically cholinergic projections from the vertical limb nucleus of the diagonal band (VDB) to the cingulate cortex in conditional visual discrimination (CVD) learning and performance in rats. We injected the cholinergic immunotoxin 192 IgG-saporin into the cingulate cortex to produce selective retrograde lesions of the cholinergic neurons projecting from the VDB to the cingulate cortex with the aim of sparing afferents of non-cingulate regions that can be disrupted by excitotoxic or immunotoxic VDB injections and non-cholinergic VDB projections that can also be damaged by excitotoxic lesions. Rats sustaining selective cholinergic denervation in this manner were significantly impaired relative to sham-operated animals in the acquisition and performance of a CVD rule of the type 'If lights are flashing FAST, press the left lever; if SLOW, press right'. Asymptotic performance of the lesion group was substantially lower than for control rats, indicating an enduring performance deficit. This impairment was associated with a selective disruption on trials with the FAST flashing stimulus. The results confirm the involvement of cholinergic innervation of the cingulate cortex in CVD performance; however, the nature of the deficit suggests a role for cholinergic modulation in task-relevant stimulus processing rather than stimulus-response learning per se.