The prefrontal cortex is involved in acquiring and maintaining information about context, including the set of task instructions and/or the outcome of previous stimulus-response sequences. Most studies on context-dependent processing in the prefrontal cortex have been concerned with such executive functions, but the prefrontal cortex is also involved in motivational operations. We thus wished t...

Numerous brain lesion and functional neuroimaging studies have suggested that the dorsolateral and frontopolar prefrontal regions are involved in complex cognitive processes subserving thought and memory. However, previously proposed functional subdivisions of prefrontal function have concentrated predominantly on posterior prefrontal cortex, including the dorsolateral, ventral, and medial regi...

The prefrontal cortex is known to represent different types of information in working memory. Contrasting theories propose that the dorsal and ventral regions of the lateral prefrontal cortex are innately specialized for the representation of spatial and nonspatial information, respectively (Goldman-Rakic, 1996), or that the two regions are shaped by the demands of cognitive tasks imposed on th...

Accumulating evidence from clinical and preclinical studies shows that catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) plays a significant role in dopamine metabolism in the prefrontal cortex, but not in the striatum. However, to what extent dopamine overflow in the prefrontal cortex and striatum is controlled by enzymatic degradation versus reuptake is unknown. We used COMT deficient mice to investigate t...

A previous paper from our lab (Shalom, 2009) presented evidence that the medial part of the prefrontal cortex is involved in the integration of raw, unintegrated information into coherent, wholistic mental representations such as perceptual objects, episodic memories, emotional states, and motor actions. It has used this analysis to classify some challenges encountered by people with Autism Spe...

Abstract Some evidence converges to consider that suicidal behaviour could be a separate diagnosis and emphasizes the relevance identify specific biomarkers. Identifying neural substrates of suicide attempt is key understanding etiology might helpful in reducing rates among psychiatric patients by promoting development novel therapeutic strategies based on behavioral neuroscience brain stimulat...

A considerable body of research has focused on neural responses evoked by emotional facial expressions, but little is known about mother-specific brain responses to infant facial emotions. We used near-infrared spectroscopy to investigate prefrontal activity during discriminating facial expressions of happy, angry, sad, fearful, surprised and neutral of unfamiliar infants and unfamiliar adults ...

The prefrontal cortex has been shown to participate in the association of events separated by time. However, it is not known whether the prefrontal cortex stores the memory for these relationships. Trace conditioning is a form of classical conditioning in which a time gap separates the conditioned stimulus (CS) from the unconditioned stimulus (US), the association of which has been shown to dep...

A dynamic interaction between the prefrontal cortex (PFC), amygdala, and nucleus accumbens (NAc) may be fundamental to regulation of goal-directed behavior by affective and cognitive processes. This study demonstrates that a mechanism for this triadic relationship is an inhibitory control by prefrontal cortex on accumbal dopamine release during amygdala activation. In freely moving rats, micros...

This study evaluated the antidepressant-like effect of lipid extract of C. striatus in chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) model of depression in male rats and its mechanism of action. The animals were subjected to CUMS for six weeks by using variety of stressors. At the end of CUMS protocol, animals were subjected to forced swimming test (FST) and open field test followed by biochemical a...