The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is involved in a wide range of executive cognitive functions, including reward evaluation, decision-making, memory extinction, mood, and task switching. Manipulation of the mPFC has been shown to alter food intake and food reward valuation, but whether exclusive stimulation of mPFC pyramidal neurons (PN), which form the principle output of the mPFC, is suffic...

The rodent medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is critical for spatial working memory (SWM), but the underlying neural processes are incompletely understood. During SWM tasks, neural activity in the mPFC becomes synchronized with theta oscillations in the hippocampus, and the strength of hippocampal-prefrontal synchrony is correlated with behavioral performance. However, to what extent the mPFC gen...

In order to further investigate the role of the mPFC in morphine reward and drug priming induced relapse, the present study examined the effects of the mPFC lesions on the acquisition and morphine priming induced reinstatement of conditioned place preference (CPP). In the first experiment, mice received sham or bilateral kainic acid lesions of the mPFC and were subsequently tested for the acqui...

Many lines of evidence suggest that a reciprocally interconnected network comprising the amygdala, ventral hippocampus (vHC), and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) participates in different aspects of the acquisition and extinction of conditioned fear responses and fear behavior. This could at least in part be mediated by direct connections from mPFC or vHC to amygdala to control amygdala activit...

Some have claimed that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) mediates decision making. Others suggest mPFC is selectively involved in the retrieval of remote long-term memory. Yet others suggests mPFC supports memory and consolidation on time scales ranging from seconds to days. How can all these roles be reconciled? We propose that the function of the mPFC is to learn associations between contex...

A recent computational neural model of medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), namely the predicted response-outcome (PRO) model (Alexander and Brown, 2011), suggests that mPFC learns to predict the outcomes of actions. The model accounted for a wide range of data on the mPFC. Nevertheless, numerous recent findings suggest that mPFC may signal predictions and prediction errors even when the predicted ...

Systemic administration of the M(1) receptor agonists N-desmethylclozapine (NDMC) and 4-[3-(4-butylpiperidin-1-yl)-propyl]-7-fluoro-4H-benzo[1,4]oxazin-3-one (AC260584) increase dopamine (DA) efflux in rat medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). This increase is blocked by systemic administration of both telenzepine, a preferential M(1) receptor antagonist, and N-[2-[4-(2-methoxyphenyl)-1-piperazinyl]...

Feedback inhibition of the amygdala via medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is an important component in the regulation of complex emotional behaviors. The functional dynamics of this corticolimbic circuitry are, in part, modulated by serotonin (5-HT). Serotonin 2A (5-HT(2A)) receptors within the mPFC represent a potential molecular mechanism through which 5-HT can modulate this corticolimbic circu...

We have studied the role of rostral medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) on reflexively evoked blinks and on classically conditioned eyelid responses in alert-behaving rabbits. The rostral mPFC was identified by its afferent projections from the medial half of the thalamic mediodorsal nuclear complex. Classical conditioning consisted of a delay paradigm using a 370-ms tone as the conditioned stimulu...

In humans recognition memory deficits, a typical feature of diencephalic amnesia, have been tentatively linked to mediodorsal thalamic nucleus (MD) damage. Animal studies have occasionally investigated the role of the MD in single-item recognition, but have not systematically analyzed its involvement in other recognition memory processes. In Experiment 1 rats with bilateral excitotoxic lesions ...