Function of cat's caudate nucleus in tasks involving spatial discontiguity between location of cue and response.

Cats were trained on go-left, go-right tasks with auditory frequency (F) or auditory location cues. The latter were used either with cue-response spatial discontiguity (LspD) or contiguity (LspC). Bilateral lesions located in the ventral segment of the caudate produced severe impairments on F and LspD tasks performance. Similar lesions, however, had no effect on the performance of the LspC task. Our findings show that spatial discontiguity between the location of cue and response is a crucial factor producing deficit on spatial tasks performance.