TY - JOUR T1 - The Ventral Midline Thalamus Contributes to Strategy Shifting in a Memory Task Requiring Both Prefrontal Cortical and Hippocampal Functions JF - The Journal of Neuroscience JO - J. Neurosci. SP - 8772 LP - 8783 DO - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0771-13.2013 VL - 33 IS - 20 AU - Thibault Cholvin AU - Michaël Loureiro AU - Raphaelle Cassel AU - Brigitte Cosquer AU - Karine Geiger AU - David De Sa Nogueira AU - Hélène Raingard AU - Laura Robelin AU - Christian Kelche AU - Anne Pereira de Vasconcelos AU - Jean-Christophe Cassel Y1 - 2013/05/15 UR - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/20/8772.abstract N2 - Electrophysiological and neuroanatomical evidence for reciprocal connections with the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the hippocampus make the reuniens and rhomboid (ReRh) thalamic nuclei a putatively major functional link for regulations of cortico-hippocampal interactions. In a first experiment using a new water escape device for rodents, the double-H maze, we demonstrated in rats that a bilateral muscimol (MSCI) inactivation (0.70 vs 0.26 and 0 nmol) of the mPFC or dorsal hippocampus (dHip) induces major deficits in a strategy shifting/spatial memory retrieval task. By way of comparison, only dHip inactivation impaired recall in a classical spatial memory task in the Morris water maze. In the second experiment, we showed that ReRh inactivation using 0.70 nmol of MSCI, which reduced performance without obliterating memory retrieval in the water maze, produces an as large strategy shifting/memory retrieval deficit as mPFC or dHip inactivation in the double-H maze. Thus, behavioral adaptations to task contingency modifications requiring a shift toward the use of a memory for place might operate in a distributed circuit encompassing the mPFC (as the potential set-shifting structure), the hippocampus (as the spatial memory substrate), and the ventral midline thalamus, and therein the ReRh (as the coordinator of this processing). The results of the current experiments provide a significant extension of our understanding of the involvement of ventral midline thalamic nuclei in cognitive processes: they point to a role of the ReRh in strategy shifting in a memory task requiring cortical and hippocampal functions and further elucidate the functional system underlying behavioral flexibility. ER -