Cerebellar Contributions to Spatial Learning and Memory: Effects of Discrete Immunotoxic Lesions

Evidence of possible cerebellar involvement in spatial processing, place learning and other types of higher order functions comes mainly from clinical observations, as well as from mutant mice and lesion studies. The latter, in particular, have reported deficits in spatial learning and memory following surgical or neurotoxic cerebellar ablation. However, the low specificity of such manipulations has often made it difficult to precisely dissect the cognitive components of the observed behaviors. Likewise, due to conflicting data coming from lesion studies, it has not been possible so far to conclusively address whether a cerebellar dysfunction is sufficient per se to induce learning deficits, or whether concurrent damage to other regulatory structure(s) is necessary to significantly interfere with cognitive processing. In the present study, the immunotoxin 192 IgG-saporin, selectively targeting cholinergic neurons in the basal forebrain and a subpopulation of cerebellar Purkinje cells, was administered to adult rats bilaterally into the basal forebrain nuclei, the cerebellar cortices or both areas combined. Additional animals underwent injections of the toxin into the lateral ventricles. Starting from two–three weeks post-lesion, the animals were tested on paradigms of motor ability as well as spatial learning and memory and then sacrificed for post-mortem morphological analyses. All lesioned rats showed no signs of ataxia and no motor deficits that could impair their performance in the water maze task. The rats with discrete cerebellar lesions exhibited fairly normal performance and did not differ from controls in any aspect of the task. By contrast, animals with double lesions, as well as those with 192 IgG-saporin given intraventricularly did manifest severe impairments in both reference and working memory. Histo- and immunohistochemical analyses confirmed the effects of the toxin conjugate on target neurons and fairly similar patterns of Purkinje cell loss in the animals with cerebellar lesion only, basal forebrain-cerebellar double lesions and bilateral intraventricular injections of the toxin. No such loss was by contrast seen in the basal forebrain-lesioned animals, whose Purkinje cells were largely spared and exhibited a normal distribution pattern. The results suggest important functional interactions between the ascending regulatory inputs from the cerebellum and those arising in the basal forebrain nuclei that would act together to modulate the complex sensory–motor and cognitive processes required to control whole body movement in space.