| Abstract: | Rats with bilateral lesions of the ventral striatal nucleus accumbens failed to acquire Pavlovian second‐order conditioning to auditory stimuli paired with visual stimuli that had previously received first‐order pairings with food. This deficit in second‐order conditioning was specific to learning driven by incentive properties of the first‐order cues, and was observed whether the first‐order training had occurred prior to or after lesion surgery. Lesions also produced deficits in the display of conditioned responses to the first‐order conditioned stimulus, but only when they were made after first‐order training. These results suggest a specific role for the ventral striatum in acquiring and expressing incentive properties of conditioned stimuli through second‐order conditioning, as well as a more general role in expressing previously acquired Pavlovian conditioned responses. |
