Disrupting the medial prefrontal cortex alters hippocampal sequences during deliberative decision making.

ABSTRACT: Current theories of deliberative decision making suggest that deliberative decisions arise from imagined simulations that require interactions between the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. In rodent navigation experiments, hippocampal theta sequences advance from the location of the rat ahead to the subsequent goal. To examine the role of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) on the hippocampus, we disrupted the mPFC with DREADDs (designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs). Using the Restaurant Row foraging task, we found that mPFC disruption resulted in decreased vicarious trial and error behavior, reduced the number of theta sequences, and impaired theta sequences in hippocampus. mPFC disruption led to larger changes in the initiation of the hippocampal theta sequences th

SUBMITTER: Schmidt B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6620703 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature