Top-Down Control of Sensorimotor Performance by Prefrontal Cortex

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This project will examine how a part of the brain, called the prefrontal cortex, isinvolved in controlling behavior. The prefrontal cortex controls behavior muchlike a business executive controls a company. "Top-down" control signals aresent from the prefrontal cortex to lower brain areas, such as the motor cortex, tocontrol when animals respond to external stimuli. These signals might conveyinformation to the motor cortex about the expected timing of stimuli or mightsimply control the timing of motor action by sending a "go" signal to the motorcortex. To investigate this issue, recordings of neural activity will be made inthe prefrontal and motor cortices as animals learn to time stimuli in a behavioraltask. Anatomical methods will be used to determine if conversations between theprefrontal and motor cortices occur through a special part of the motor cortex,called the premotor cortex.Intellectual merit: This project will be one of the first to examine interactions betweenneurons in prefrontal and motor areas of the cerebral cortex by recordingin the two areas simultaneously. This project is also unique in that interactionsthese areas are studied during learning. Finally, the project will be the first to resolveif the rodent premotor cortex receives information from the prefrontal cortexand thus might provide the first evidence that rodents have a cortical area that isanalogous to the premotor cortex of higher animals, including human beings.Broader impact: All experimental protocols and procedures will be made availableto the neuroscience community and the general public. A novel Linux distributionwill be developed that contains programs needed to reproduce this research.Undergraduate students will support these efforts. Students in Yale'sSummer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program will take part inthe project and will be supervised by graduate students working in the PI's lab,who will acquire training that goes beyond normal graduate student research activities.In addition, the PI has initiated a neuroscience program for young childrenthrough a local public library and is taking part in the Neuroscientist-TeacherPartner Program of the Society for Neuroscience. All materials from the libraryprogram and the PI's interactions with local teachers will be made available athttp://spikelab.jbpierce.org.