Temporal Neocortical Injuries in Rats Impair Attending but not Complex Visual Processing

The effects of variations of the distance between the relevant stimuli and the animals' response sites were observed upon the performances of a black-white discrimination habit for normal rats or subjects prepared with either bilateral injuries to the visual or temporal neocortex. In addition, the animals were given a strict test of visual form perception. Subjects with injuries to the visual cortex failed the test of visual form perception but performed like normals in discriminating a spatially discontiguous problem. In contrast, subjects with temporal injuries exhibited enormous performance deficits when trained on a spatially discontiguous problem but performed like normals on the test of form perception. The findings parallel the results of studies using primates and suggest that bitemporal injuries result in impairments of attending and not of complex visual processing.