Medial prefrontal cortex is selectively involved in response selection using visual context in the background

Abstract

The exact roles of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in conditional choice behavior are unknown and a visual contextual response selection task was used for examining the issue. Inactivation of the mPFC severely disrupted performance in the task. mPFC inactivations, however, did not disrupt the capability of perceptual discrimination for visual stimuli. Normal response selection was also observed when nonvisual cues were used as conditional stimuli. The results strongly suggest that the mPFC is not necessarily involved in the inhibition of response or flexible response selection in general, but is rather critical when response selection is required conditionally using visual context in the background.