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Abstract:
Attention is a critical component of normal cognitive functioning that
requires the prefrontal cortex. Lesion studies in rats suggest that
the medial prefrontal (mPFC) and anterior cingulate (Cg) sub-regions
are both involved in controlling attention. However, little is known
about how cells in these regions encode different aspects of
attentional processing. We have developed the 3-choice serial reaction
time task (CSRT), which is an analog of the 5-CSRT task used to study
visual attention in the rat. The task requires a rat to divide
attention between 3 brief light stimuli (300 msec duration) presented
in random order across nose poke holes in an operant conditioning
chamber. A correct response into a lit cue results in a reward
delivery, while an incorrect response into an unlit cue or a missed
response is punished with house-light extinguishment. We are utilizing
extracellular recording arrays during behavior task performance to
study the neuronal correlates of visual attention in the mPFC and Cg
regions. Our results suggest that both regions have neural activity at
both the single neuron and local field potential level, which
correlates with attention. We are currently assessing the multi-scale
"functional integrations" among discrete and distributed attention
networks by 1) analyzing the correlations between single unit pairs
and 2) the relationship between single unit firing and local field potential oscillatory phase.
