Hippocampectomy disrupts the topography of conditioned nictitating membrane responses during reversal learning.

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Abstract
The effects of bilateral hippocampectomy on the topography, or shape, of conditioned nictitating membrane (NM) responses were examined in rabbits during 4 learning tasks: 1-tone delay conditioning, unpaired extinction, 2-tone discrimination and reversal of 2-tone discrimination. Hippocampal ablation altered conditioned NM response topography only during reversal learning and not during the other training paradigms. The shapes of learning curves for hippocampectomized animals were different from those of control animals during reversal conditioning but not during the other paradigms. The implications of these findings with respect to unit-recording studies of hippocampal cellular activity during classical conditioning of the NM response are discussed.