Is the rat prefrontal cortex crucial for cognitive control during spatial cognition?

Abstract

Cognitive control tasks require using one class of information while ignoring competing classes of information. The central role of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in cognitive control is well established in the primate literature, and largely accepted in the rodent literature because mPFC damage causes deficits in tasks that may require cognitive control, as inferred, typically from the task design. In prior work, we used an active place avoidance task where a rat or mouse on a rotating arena is required to avoid the stationary task-relevant locations of a mild shock and ignore the rotating task-irrelevant locations of those shocks. The task is impaired by hippocampal manipulations, and the discharge of hippocampal place cell populations judiciously alternates between representing stationary locations near the shock zone and rotating locations far from the shock zone, demonstrating cognitive control concurrently in behavior and the hippocampal representation of spatial information. Here we test whether rat mPFC lesion impairs the active place avoidance task to evaluate two competing hypotheses, a "central-computation" hypothesis that the mPFC is essential for the computations required for cognitive control and an alternative "local-computation" hypothesis that other brain areas can perform the computations required for cognitive control, independent of mPFC. Ibotenic acid lesion of the mPFC was effective, damaging the cingulate, prelimbic and infralimbic cortices. The lesion also altered the normal coordination of metabolic activity across remaining structures. The lesion did not impair learning to avoid the initial location of shock or long-term place avoidance memory, but impaired avoidance after the shock was relocated. The lesion also did not impair the alternation between task-relevant and task-irrelevant hippocampal representations of place information. These findings support the local-computation hypothesis that computations required for cognitive control can occur locally in brain networks independently of the mPFC.