Cognitive Control of Behavior and Hippocampal Information Processing without Medial Prefrontal Cortex

This study investigated whether rat medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) lesion impairs the active place avoidance task to evaluate two competing hypotheses: a ‘central-computation’ hypothesis that the mPFC is essential for the computations required for cognitive control and an alternative ‘local-computation’ hypothesis that other brain areas can perform the computations required for cognitive control, independent of mPFC. Thirty adult male Long Evans rats were used in the experiment, where fifteen rats were randomly assigned to the lesion group, fourteen rats were assigned to the sham group, and one animal was used to confirm the coordinates. Three of the sham and three of the mPFC lesions rats were used for the electrophysiology recordings. In addition, locomotion during the pretraining sessions were examined to assess the effect of mPFC lesion on behavior. This dataset includes electrophysiological and behavioral tracking data.