Topic: prelimbic cortex

Memories of emotionally-salient events are long-lasting, guiding behavior from minutes to years after learning. The prelimbic cortex (PL) is required for fear memory retrieval across time and is densely interconnected with many subcortical and cortical areas involved in recent and remote memory recall, including the temporal association area (TeA). While the behavioral expression of a memory may remain constant over time, the neural activity mediating memory-guided behavior is dynamic. In PL, different neurons underlie recent and remote memory retrieval and remote memory-encoding neurons have

Normative development in adolescence indicates that the prefrontal cortex is still under development thereby unable to exert efficient top-down inhibitory control on subcortical regions such as the basolateral amygdala and the nucleus accumbens. This imbalance in the developmental trajectory between cortical and subcortical regions is implicated in expression of the prototypical impulsive, compulsive, reward seeking and risk-taking adolescent behavior. Here we demonstrate that a chronic mild unpredictable stress procedure during adolescence in male Wistar rats arrests the normal behavioral mat

Motivational drives are internal states that can be different even in similar interactions with external stimuli. Curiosity as the motivational drive for novelty-seeking and investigating the surrounding environment is for survival as essential and intrinsic as hunger. Curiosity, hunger, and appetitive aggression drive three different goal-directed behaviors—novelty seeking, food eating, and hunting— but these behaviors are composed of similar actions in animals. This similarity of actions has made it challenging to study novelty seeking and distinguish it from eating and hunting in nonarticul

How are actions linked with subsequent outcomes to guide choices? The nucleus accumbens (NAc), which is implicated in this process, receives glutamatergic inputs from the prelimbic cortex (PL) and midline regions of the thalamus (mTH). However, little is known about what is represented in PL or mTH neurons that project to NAc (PL-NAc and mTH-NAc). By comparing these inputs during a reinforcement learning task in mice, we discovered that i) PL-NAc preferentially represents actions and choices, ii) mTH-NAc preferentially represents cues, iii) choice-selective activity in PL-NAc is organized in s

The prefrontal cortex plays a key role in the representation of cognitive parameters, including task-relevant sensory cues, action selection and context. However, the contribution of GABAergic inhibitory interneuron types to the representation of these task features in active cell assemblies and their formation is incompletely understood. Here we focus specifically on parvalbumin (PVIs) and somatostatin (SOMIs) expressing interneurons within the prelimbic cortex (PL) of mice, as these interneuron types have been described to be involved in context encoding.We designed a contextual-auditory sti

Goal-directed action control relies on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), where distinct subsections collaborate in functional networks. The extent to which the network favors a hierarchical system, characterized by early convergence within the PFC, versus a shallow brain hypothesis, featuring numerous parallel circuits from the cortex to downstream targets, remains elusive (Suzuki et al. 2023). Employing optogenetic modulation, behavioral assessments, and fMRI, we investigate the impact of PFC subarea-stimulation on motor control and whole-brain activation patterns. We quantified error rate and rea