“
“Current Opinion in Behavioral BMS-777607 Sciences 2015, 1:78–85 This review comes from a themed issue on Cognitive neuroscience Edited by Cindy Lustig and Howard Eichenbaum http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2014.10.005 2352-1546/© 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/). It is an obvious, but sometimes overlooked, fact that it frequently takes many weeks to get an experimental animal to perform a task that could be explained to a human participant

in a matter of minutes. From one perspective, this neatly encapsulates how useful language is to communicate information. However, it also highlights just how important, and often difficult, it can be without such input to determine which specific elements of a complex environment should be used to guide and update behaviour. This is particularly evident in situations where stimuli and rewards are separated in space and time, can have different meanings depending on the external context or internal state, and can also provide several different types of information (for instance, a food or fluid reward might both satisfy an

internal need and provide information that the correct response has been made) [1]. One pressing question is Selleck AZD5363 therefore what neural structures help select relevant information and inhibit irrelevant information for the task in hand and how these relate to neural mechanisms implicated in value-guided decision making 2, 3, 4, 5, 6•• and 7]. A related issue concerns the mechanisms that allow us to determine, and potentially seek out, information relevant to satisfy

a current need, and also how these systems interrelate with circuits implicated in reward seeking [8]. While these are complex topics, in this brief review we will focus on converging evidence that the lateral parts of orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) play key roles in these faculties. OFC and Liothyronine Sodium VMPFC are large structures consisting of multiple distinct areas. Nonetheless, there are anatomical similarities between certain regions, which has allowed Price to define two distinct, though interconnected, networks in rodents, monkeys and humans [9]. First, an ‘orbital sensory’ network, including Walker’s areas 11, 12 and 13 and parts of anterior insula in primates, receives rich sensory information from all sensory modalities and also projects back to sensory structures. The equivalent network in the rat would include LO, VLO and AIv. By contrast, a ‘medial visceromotor’ network, including medial OFC area 14 as well as areas 25 and 32 and medial area 10, is characterised by strong connections with the medial temporal lobe as well as projections to limbic regions such as ventral striatum and lateral hypothalamus. In the rat, this network is likely made up of MO (medial orbital), prelimbic and infralimbic cortex.