The transient decline in hippocampal theta power during response inhibition in a positive patterning task

It is believed that a transient decline in hippocampal theta power is induced by behavioral inhibition during a go/no-go stimulus discrimination task. In a previously reported positive patterning (PP) task, rats learn to lever press when a compound stimulus, both tone and light, is presented and inhibit their lever press when a single stimulus, tone or light, is presented. In this task, rats were required to inhibit their response to the single stimulus in a task where both compound and single stimuli were presented with an overlapping element. Thus, we hypothesized that there would be a transient decline in hippocampal theta power induced by behavioral inhibition to the presence of a single stimuli in the PP task. The result of this study showed that a decline in hippocampal theta power occurred during response inhibition to the presence of a single tone stimulus in the PP task, supporting our hypothesis. However, we did not observe any decline in hippocampal theta power during response inhibition to the presence of a single light stimulus. We found that the error response rate for the tone stimulus was slightly lower than that for light stimulus in the PP task. Thus, we proposed that the decline in hippocampal theta power related to more accurate response inhibition to the stimulus that had an overlapping element.