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The prefrontal cortex is a cortical area located in the anterior frontal lobe, including several subdivisions (e.g. ventromedial, dorsolateral, orbitofrontal cortices). The prefrontal cortex functions in cognitive control (e.g. planning, attention, problem-solving, error-monitoring, decision-making, social cognition, and working memory).
Approach and avoidance behavior is disrupted in many psychiatric disorders, but the neural circuits that support this behavior are unknown. Here, the authors identify a theta-mediated limbic circuit that support approach and avoidance decision-making, contributing to a network understanding of psychiatric disorders, especially those characterized by maladaptive avoidance.
The roles of orbitofrontal and cingulate cortex in emotional decisions remain unclear. Here the authors show distinct timing between caudal orbitofrontal and cingulate signals, that orbitofrontal stimulation increases avoidance, and that physiological responses mirror behavior.
The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encodes the value, salience and valence of learned stimuli along distinct neural dimensions, and the geometry of these representations shapes motivated behaviours in mice.
Mice react differently to others’ stress depending on their own past experience of the same (but not different) stress. Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) neuron activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) specifically modulates the influence of affective past experience on emotional reactions to others, which was estrus-dependent in females and dominance-dependent in males.
One of two anatomically and functionally characterized subpopulations of neurons in the mouse paraventricular thalamus forms a thalamo-corticothalamic loop with the infralimbic cortex that regulates arousal.
Certain lasting antidepressant effects of ketamine in a mouse model of depression depend on the restoration of dendritic spines in the prefrontal cortex.
