Figure 2. VC lesions recapitulate learning impairment induced by the ablation of cortico-striatal neurons.

(A) Schematic of surgical ablation of visual cortex (VC). (B) Left: Coronal sections from an example mouse illustrating the surgical ablation of the right VC. Right: Corresponding coronal plane from the Paxinos mouse brain atlas with the spread of the lesion in orange shading. (C) Population average learning curves over 14 days of training for mice in which VC was surgically ablated before the onset of training (N = 8 mice). The purple dotted line is data from intact animals (from Figure 1C) for comparison. Green dotted line is data from CSt-ablated animals (from Figure 1E) for comparison. Data plotted as mean ± SEM. Note that the VC lesion recapitulates the learning impairment of CSt-ablated mice. (D) Left: Population average slope aROC/day across experimental groups. Intact (gray), VC lesion (VC: orange), retroAAV-Cre only (rCre: purple), CSt-lesion (CSt:aqua), CT-lesion (CT: blue). Middle: Population average of spontaneous licking (ILI: inter lick time interval) behavior during the gray screen period of the inter trial interval (ITI). Right: Population average number of trials per training session. Data plotted as mean ± SEM.

Figure 2—figure supplement 1. Histology of cortical lesions.

Left: Schematic of cortical ablation by surgical of VC. Middle: Three coronal sections from an example mouse illustrating the surgical ablation of the right VC. The lesioned area (orange shaded area) is overlaid with outlines of the corresponding coronal plane from the Paxinos mouse brain atlas (same mouse as shown in Figure 2B). Right: Lesion size reported as mean feret diameter. Each data point is the average medio-lateral extent of the cortical lesion of one animal. The box plot illustrates median, first, and third quartiles.