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The prefrontal cortex is a cortical area located in the anterior frontal lobe, including several subdivisions (e.g. ventromedial, dorsolateral, orbitofrontal cortices). The prefrontal cortex functions in cognitive control (e.g. planning, attention, problem-solving, error-monitoring, decision-making, social cognition, and working memory).
The capacity to prevent unwanted thoughts is important for cognitive function and mental health. Anderson et al. describe insights into the neural mechanisms of the inhibitory control of thought that have been gained from studies of retrieval stopping and discuss how this knowledge informs our understanding of psychiatric disorders associated with intrusive thinking.
Neurons in the rodent dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encode a flexible internal model of emotion by linking directly experienced and inferred associations with aversive experiences.
Early life experience modulates stress resilience in later life. Here the authors show that maternal care triggers microglia-derived IGF-1 levels, which suppresses the neuronal C/EBPβ-DRP1 axis, promoting stress resilience in adolescent mice.
Mice react differently to others’ stress depending on their own past experience of the same (but not different) stress. Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) neuron activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) specifically modulates the influence of affective past experience on emotional reactions to others, which was estrus-dependent in females and dominance-dependent in males.
One of two anatomically and functionally characterized subpopulations of neurons in the mouse paraventricular thalamus forms a thalamo-corticothalamic loop with the infralimbic cortex that regulates arousal.
Certain lasting antidepressant effects of ketamine in a mouse model of depression depend on the restoration of dendritic spines in the prefrontal cortex.
