TY - JOUR T1 - Evoked frontal and parietal field potential signatures of target detection and response inhibition in rats performing an equiprobable auditory go/no-go task JF - eneuro JO - eNeuro DO - 10.1523/ENEURO.0055-19.2019 SP - ENEURO.0055-19.2019 AU - Payal Nanda AU - Allyn Morris AU - Jessica Kelemen AU - Jane Yang AU - Michael C. Wiest Y1 - 2019/11/25 UR - http://www.eneuro.org/content/early/2019/11/25/ENEURO.0055-19.2019.abstract N2 - To characterize the rat as a potential model of frontal-parietal auditory processing during sustained attention, target detection, and response inhibition, we recorded field potentials (FPs) at multiple sites in medial-dorsal frontal and posterior parietal cortex simultaneously while rats performed an equiprobable auditory go/no-go discrimination task. ERPs were calculated by averaging tone-triggered FPs across hit, miss, false alarm (FA), and correct rejection (CR) trials separately for each recording session, and five peak amplitudes (termed N1, P2, N2, P3E and P3L) were extracted from the individual-session ERPs. Comparing peak amplitudes across different trials types indicated a statistically significant amplification of the P2 peak on hit trials that accompanies detection of the target tone prior to the behavioral go response. This result appears analogous to human ERP phenomena during auditory target discrimination. Conversely, the rat P3 responses were not associated with target detection as in the human ERP literature. Likewise, we did not observe the “no-go N2” or “no-go P3” responses reported in the human literature in association with response inhibition, which might reflect differences in task context or a difference in auditory processing between rats and humans. We also present analyses of stimulus-induced spectral power and inter-area coherence to characterize oscillatory synchronization which may contribute to ERPs, and discuss possible error-related processing at the N2, P3E and P3L peaks.Significance Statement Our results constrain potential neural models of sustained attention and auditory discrimination in rat cortex. To our knowledge our study is the first to unambiguously support that the rat P2 auditory ERP component is amplified by target detection as distinct from response production. This validates that our experimental paradigm can be used to mechanistically probe the cellular basis of the ERP, and potentially could reveal how ERP phenomena are disrupted in multiple neuropsychiatric disorders. Our results complement those of “active oddball” studies in which a neural response potentially related to target detection or response activation may be confounded with automatic rare-tone response amplification. ER -