The role of the infralimbic cortex in decision making processes

• Published in: Current opinion in behavioral sciences 2021-10, Vol.41, p.138-143
• Main Authors: Roughley, Stephanie, Killcross, Simon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2352-1546; 2352-1554
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.06.003

•Inactivation or lesion of the infralimbic cortex in rats is associated with deficits in decision-making tasks.•These include Pavlovian and instrumental tasks in both appetitive and aversive domains.•Many tasks where deficits occur require animals to encode several alternative outcomes or responses to a single cue.•Tasks where multiple cues are mapped to multiple outcomes do not appear to reveal IL-related deficits.•The infralimbic cortex seems critical to the development of associations between a single cue and multiple outcomes. Interpretations of the role of the infralimbic region of the medial prefrontal cortex in decision making in rats are based on a wide range of tasks, both appetitive and aversive, as well as Pavlovian and instrumental. These range in complexity from what appear to be simple procedures (such as extinction) through to more complicated tasks involving, for example, risk-based decision making and contextual biconditional discriminations. We derive from these tasks a common theme that may stimulate greater analysis of the nature of decision making tasks in order to better understand the function of prefrontal systems. One interpretation is that the infralimbic region may be important in the ability of rats to simultaneously hold competing associations with the same, single cue.