Bilateral ablation of the auditory cortex in the rat alters conditioned emotional suppression to a sound as appraised through a latent inhibition study.

Latent inhibition consists of a retardation of conditioning seen when the to be conditioned stimulus is presented a number of times with no other consequence. This phenomenon likely reflects processes of selective attention whereby irrelevant stimuli come to be ignored. Using physiological models for auditory attention, some investigators have suggested that selective attention acts as a filtering mechanism capable of inhibiting or gating unattended stimuli relative to attended ones in the auditory cortex. In the present work, an on-baseline conditioned suppression response procedure was used to study the effects of stimulus preexposure in rats submitted to bilateral auditory cortex ablation. Our results indicate that both auditory cortex lesioned and control animals exhibit latent inhibition to a sound. However, learning after preexposure to that sound was particularly slow in animals with bilateral auditory cortex lesion, i.e. in these animals, the latent inhibition effect appeared to be enhanced. Conditioning from one day to the next also varied slightly. Thus, the auditory cortex appears to modulate learning when the conditioned stimulus is a sound.