Department of Neuroscience, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, United States.
Elife. 2023 Jan 18;12:e82833. doi: 10.7554/eLife.82833.
Decision-making involves multiple cognitive processes requiring different aspects of information about the situation at hand. The rodent medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been hypothesized to be central to these abilities. Functional studies have sought to link specific processes to specific anatomical subregions, but past studies of mPFC have yielded controversial results, leaving the precise nature of mPFC function unclear. To settle this debate, we recorded from the full dorso-ventral extent of mPFC in each of 8 rats, as they performed a complex economic decision task. These data revealed four distinct functional domains within mPFC that closely mirrored anatomically identified subregions, including novel evidence to divide prelimbic cortex into dorsal and ventral components. We found that dorsal aspects of mPFC (ACC, dPL) were more involved in processing information about active decisions, while ventral aspects (vPL, IL) were more engaged in motivational factors.
决策涉及多个认知过程，需要对当前情况的各个方面的信息进行处理。啮齿动物的内侧前额叶皮层（mPFC）被认为是这些能力的核心。功能研究试图将特定的过程与特定的解剖亚区联系起来，但过去对 mPFC 的研究产生了有争议的结果，使得 mPFC 功能的精确性质仍不清楚。为了解决这一争论，我们在 8 只大鼠中记录了 mPFC 的整个背腹范围，当它们执行一项复杂的经济决策任务时。这些数据揭示了 mPFC 内四个不同的功能域，与解剖学上确定的亚区密切对应，包括将前额叶皮层划分为背侧和腹侧成分的新证据。我们发现 mPFC 的背侧部分（ACC、dPL）更多地参与了处理关于主动决策的信息，而腹侧部分（vPL、IL）则更多地参与了动机因素。
