Janice L. Muir

TL;DR: Although shell-lesioned rats showed no deficit in any test of instrumental conditioning or in Pavlovian conditioning, they failed to show any positive transfer in the Pavlovia-instrumental transfer test, which suggests that nucleus accumbens core and shell differentially mediate the impact of instrumental and Pavlovians incentive processes, respectively, on instrumental performance.

TL;DR: The main finding from this paradigm was that lesions of the lateral frontal cortex produced a significant disruption to the retention of passive avoidance, which stands in marked contrast to the successful retention observed by animals of the other lesion groups.

TL;DR: Results suggest that the most consistent deficit produced following lesions of the BF-cortical cholinergic system is attentional dysfunction, similar to deficits in visual attention seen in patients with Alzheimer's disease, which can be improved by anti- cholinesterase treatment.

TL;DR: It is proposed that attentional set shifting is mediated by a balanced interaction between prefrontal and striatal dopamine, and that elevated dopamine contributes to the improvement in Attentional set-shifting ability.

TL;DR: The contribution of behavioural animal and human studies to out understanding of the role of the basal forebrain cholinergic neurons in age-related cognitive impairments is examined.