While they wait: Rodent frontal cortex and delayed response performance.

摘要

Waiting requires suppressing responses until the right time or the right stimulus has occurred. Here, we describe a neural system in rats that controls waiting during a delayed response task. First, we show that inactivating rodent prefrontal cortex impairs rodents' ability to wait in tasks with variable and fixed delays. We then record from populations of neurons from rodent frontal cortex and demonstrate that rodent prefrontal regions are involved in anticipating the expected timing of forthcoming trigger stimuli. Finally, we show that inactivating rodent prefrontal cortex specifically decreases delay-related neural activity in rodent motor cortex. These data are convergent with primate studies that suggest that prefrontal regions are critical to the temporal organization of behavior, and provide strong evidence that in rats, prefrontal regions are critical to the temporal control of action.