Experiments are described on reversal of learned responses in the octopus. It is shown that normal animals are able to reverse learned responses to vertical and horizontal rectangles shown successively but that animals lacking vertical lobes are unable to reverse such a discrimination. These, and related, results are discussed in relation to the hypothesis that learning consists in appropriate conditioning of cells in the optic lobes that respond to particular visual features but that the vertical lobe plays an important part in making the memory effective, perhaps by generalising the conditioning to optic lobe cells other than those directly stimulated in the process of learning.
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