Lesions of the Dorsal Medial Hippocampus induce different forms of Repetitive Behaviour in the rat A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Psychology By

2015 2 Acknowledgement In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Beneficient Firstly, I would like to thank the Almighty Allah for granting me the opportunity to come to New Zealand and undertake this research work. I would especially like to thank my husband for being there by my side and providing constant support and encouragement all through. I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Juan Canales for his supervision. I appreciate all the help my co-supervisor, Prof. John Dalrymple-Alford provided and making himself available when needed. I also extend my thanks to Dr. Joseph Garner for taking out his time and helping me with the statistics for the perseveration task. I would like to thank Silvana, Neroli and Kate at the Animal facility for extending care to the animals. I would like to extend my thanks to my colleagues-Echo, Jungah and Alex for assisting me in the conductance of my experimental work. Lastly, I would like to thank my family members, without whose unconditional support, this thesis would not have been possible. Figure 1. Corticostriatal circuits as proposed by Alexander et al. (1986). Each circuit receives output from several functionally related cortical areas (A, B and C) that send partially overlapping projections to restricted parts of striatum. These striatal regions send converging projections to the globus pallidus (pallidum) and substantia nigra (s. nigra), which in turn project to specific regions of the thalamus. Each thalamic region projects back to one of the cortical areas that feed into the circuit, thereby completing the ''closed