NSF Award
0642951
This project will examine how a part of the brain, called the prefrontal cortex, is<br/>involved in controlling behavior. The prefrontal cortex controls behavior much<br/>like a business executive controls a company. "Top-down" control signals are<br/>sent from the prefrontal cortex to lower brain areas, such as the motor cortex, to<br/>control when animals respond to external stimuli. These signals might convey<br/>information to the motor cortex about the expected timing of stimuli or might<br/>simply control the timing of motor action by sending a "go" signal to the motor<br/>cortex. To investigate this issue, recordings of neural activity will be made in<br/>the prefrontal and motor cortices as animals learn to time stimuli in a behavioral<br/>task. Anatomical methods will be used to determine if conversations between the<br/>prefrontal and motor cortices occur through a special part of the motor cortex,<br/>called the premotor cortex.<br/><br/>Intellectual merit: This project will be one of the first to examine interactions between<br/>neurons in prefrontal and motor areas of the cerebral cortex by recording<br/>in the two areas simultaneously. This project is also unique in that interactions<br/>these areas are studied during learning. Finally, the project will be the first to resolve<br/>if the rodent premotor cortex receives information from the prefrontal cortex<br/>and thus might provide the first evidence that rodents have a cortical area that is<br/>analogous to the premotor cortex of higher animals, including human beings.<br/><br/>Broader impact: All experimental protocols and procedures will be made available<br/>to the neuroscience community and the general public. A novel Linux distribution<br/>will be developed that contains programs needed to reproduce this research.<br/>Undergraduate students will support these efforts. Students in Yale's<br/>Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program will take part in<br/>the project and will be supervised by graduate students working in the PI's lab,<br/>who will acquire training that goes beyond normal graduate student research activities.<br/>In addition, the PI has initiated a neuroscience program for young children<br/>through a local public library and is taking part in the Neuroscientist-Teacher<br/>Partner Program of the Society for Neuroscience. All materials from the library<br/>program and the PI's interactions with local teachers will be made available at<br/>http://spikelab.jbpierce.org.
