Prelimbic and infralimbic cortical inactivations attenuate contextually driven discriminative responding for reward

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Behavioral Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience

Background:

• The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), specifically the infralimbic (IL) and prelimbic (PL) cortices, plays a role in context-dependent behaviors.
• While the PL is linked to fear and drug-seeking, and the IL to suppressing these, their roles in natural reward-seeking are less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the functional roles of the IL and PL cortices in the contextual control of cue-driven natural reward-seeking.
• To examine the involvement of these mPFC subregions in appetitively motivated contextual memories.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a contextual biconditional discrimination (CBD) task in rats to assess reward-seeking behavior.
• Administered GABA receptor agonists (muscimol, baclofen) or saline via microinjections into the IL or PL.
• Evaluated performance during training and probe tests under extinction conditions.

Main Results:

• Inactivation of both the IL and PL cortices led to significant impairments in CBD task performance.
• This suggests that both subregions are essential for processing contextual information related to natural rewards.

Conclusions:

• The study highlights a critical role for both the IL and PL cortices in the contextual control of natural reward-seeking.
• Both regions are involved in the processing of appetitively motivated contextual memories, challenging a simple dichotomy of function.