Medial Frontal Cortex Mediates Perceptual Attentional Set Shifting in the Rat

By Jennifer M. Birrell, V. Brown. Journal of Neuroscience, 2000

1,458 citations recorded by the source corpus.

If rodents do not display the behavioral complexity that is subserved in primates by prefrontal cortex, then evolution of prefrontal cortex in the rat should be doubted. Primate prefrontal cortex has been shown to mediate shifts in attention between perceptual dimensions of complex stimuli. This study examined the possibility that medial frontal cortex of the rat is involved in the shifting of perceptual attentional set. We trained rats to perform an attentional set-shifting task that is formally the same as a task used in monkeys and humans. Rats were trained to dig in bowls for a food reward. The bowls were presented in pairs, only one of which was baited. The rat had to select the bowl in which to dig by its odor, the medium that filled the bowl, or the texture that covered its surface. In a single session, rats performed a series of discriminations, including reversals, an intradimensional shift, and an extradimensional shift. Bilateral lesions by injection of ibotenic acid in medial frontal cortex resulted in impairment in neither initial acquisition nor reversal learning. We report here the same selective impairment in shifting of attentional set in the rat as seen in primates with lesions of prefrontal cortex. We conclude that medial frontal cortex of the rat has functional similarity to primate lateral prefrontal cortex.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c654bfe44c793ed69364b2b72e3d268ddd6d1cce

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Citations in the corpus

What is it like to be a rat? Rat sensory perception and its implications for experimental design and rat welfare (2008, background): “…associations for longer than equivalent visual ones (Wallace et al., 1980), and can more rapidly learn discriminations using multimodal stimuli (floor surfaces differing in appearance, smell, and texture Dymond, 1995; Dymond et al., 1996) or olfactory or tactile cues (Birrell & Brown, 2000).”
Physiology and neurobiology of stress and adaptation: central role of the brain. (2007, background): “Attention set shifting is a task in which a rat first learns that either odor or the digging medium in a pair of bowls predicts where food reward is to be found, then new cues are introduced and the rat needs to learn which ones predict the location of food (33).”
Replay of rule-learning related neural patterns in the prefrontal cortex during sleep (2009, methodology): “We recorded neural activity in the PFC and the hippocampus in rats during a cross-modal rule shift task (known to implicate the medial PF”
Coherent theta oscillations and reorganization of spike timing in the hippocampal- prefrontal network upon learning. (2010, positive): “Such extradimensional set shift tasks require an intact medial prefrontal cortex (Pfc) in rats (Birrell and Brown, 2000; Delatour and Gisquet-Verrier, 2000).”
Orienting and reorienting: the locus coeruleus mediates cognition through arousal. (2012, positive): “More recently, Brown and colleagues developed a complex extradimensional shift (EDS) task in which rats had to identify which of the multiple dimensions of a compound stimulus was associated with reward and shift between attentional sets every time the contingency between the stimulus dimension and ”
Interplay of hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in memory (2013, positive): “In support of this view, several studies have shown that damage to mPFC impairs the ability of rats (or monkeys or humans [35]) to switch between remembering different perceptual dimensions of compound stimuli (for example [36]), to switch between remembering a ‘place’ or ‘response’ strategy for sol”
Repeated stress induces dendritic spine loss in the rat medial prefrontal cortex. (2006, background): “Moreover, medial PFC lesions result in the disinhibition of some affective behaviors and attentional impairments in rodent and primate models (Morgan and LeDoux, 1995; Dias et al., 1996; Birrell and Brown, 2000).”
The cingulum bundle: Anatomy, function, and dysfunction (2018, positive): “Related evidence comes from the disruptive effects of medial frontal lesions when switching between stimulus classes (‘extra-dimensional shift’) during serial discriminations (Birrell and Brown, 2000).”
Using mice to model Alzheimer's dementia: an overview of the clinical disease and the preclinical behavioral changes in 10 mouse models (2014, background): “…tasks The animal must shift back and forth between changing rules to successfully obtain a reward Executive function and cognitive ﬂexibility Birrell and Brown, 2000 Reversal learning Adjustment to changes in reward contingency Executive function and working memory Butter, 1969; Bussey…”
Prefrontal executive and cognitive functions in rodents: neural and neurochemical substrates. (2004, background): “Accumulating evidence supports a role for the prefrontal cortex in attentional functions [12,17,26,28,38,35,57,95].”
Understanding behaviour: the relevance of ethological approaches in laboratory animal science (2003, background): “…sessions amounting to hundreds of trials to discriminate between two simple visual patterns (e.g. Shepp and Eimas, 1964; Bussey et al., 1997), discriminations between odour or tactile cues are learned within a single session of 10–20 trials (e.g. Birrell and Brown, 2000; Colacicco et al., 2002).”
Orbital prefrontal cortex mediates reversal learning and not attentional set shifting in the rat. (2003, methodology): “The attentional set-shifting task was adapted to use stimuli and responses appropriate for rats [4], while remaining formally the same as the task used in monkeys [8–10,21]and humans[11–18].”
Prospective Optimization (2014, background): “, tactile to visual) while performing complex tasks [63]–[66].”