Emotional and behavioral correlates of the anterior cingulate cortex during associative learning in rats
Section snippets
Subjects and experimental design
Nine male albino Wistar rats weighing 270–330 g (SLC, Hamamatsu, Japan) were used. The housing area was temperature controlled at 23°C and maintained on a 12-h/12-h light–dark cycle. Rats were placed on the water-deprivation regimen (see “Training” section). A rat was painlessly placed in the special stereotaxic apparatus with a device for sensory stimuli (Fig. 1A). Sensory stimuli included auditory (300-, 530-, 1200- and 2860-Hz tone), visual (white light) and configural (simultaneous
Classification of the anterior cingulate neurons
Over a period of one to three months for each rat, recordings were made from 418 neurons in and around the anterior cingulate cortex during the conditioning tasks. Of these, 321 neurons were located in the anterior cingulate cortex, and all 321 neurons were tested with at least the reward task. Of these 321 anterior cingulate neurons, 62 (19.3%; 62/321) responded (excitatory or inhibitory) in one or more phases of the task. These 62 responsive neurons were classified into two types in terms of
Spontaneous firing rates and latencies of rat anterior cingulate neurons
Spontaneous firing rates of anterior cingulate neurons in awake rabbits ranged from 1 to 17 spikes/s,25 which were comparable to those of the rat anterior cingulate neurons in the present study. In the present study, the differential conditioned stimulus-related neurons tended to have longer latencies than those of non-differential conditioned stimulus-related neurons. Previously, we reported a similar trend in the monkey amygdala,49., 50. the monkey septal nuclei,35 the monkey hippocampal
Conclusions
In the present study, anterior cingulate cortex neurons were classified into two categories based on the neuronal responses during each task phase: conditioned stimulus-related and ingestion/ICSS-related neurons. Analysis by MDS of differential conditioned stimulus-related neurons categorized the conditioned stimuli into three groups based on reward contingency, regardless of the physical characteristics of the stimuli in a two-dimensional space: the three conditioned stimuli (two elemental and
Acknowledgements
We thank Dr P. S. Grigson (The Pennsylvania State University) and Dr P. Martin (Toyama Medical and Pharmaceutical University) for help in preparing this manuscript. This work was supported partly by Japanese Ministry of Education, Science and Culture Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (11308033, 08279105, 10680762, 11145217), and by Funds for Comprehensive Research on Aging and Health.
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