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Prefrontal Cortex Can Block Creative Problem
Neuroscience News • • health
Key Points:
- Researchers at Emory University discovered that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), traditionally seen as key to behavioral flexibility, can inhibit problem-solving by enforcing an old, memory-based "win-stay" habit in mice.
- In a pup-retrieval T-maze task, silencing the mPFC using chemogenetics accelerated mice’s learning to adopt a more efficient auditory cue strategy, reducing the learning period from up to eight days to just two to three days.
- Silencing the auditory cortex impaired the mice’s ability to learn the sound-guided strategy, causing them to persist with the default memory-based approach, highlighting distinct roles of these brain regions in strategy learning.
- The findings challenge the conventional view of the prefrontal cortex as solely promoting cognitive flexibility, suggesting that suppressing mPFC activity may be necessary to "think outside the box" and form new sensory-driven habits.
- The Liu Lab is extending this research to autism mouse models and exploring non-invasive human brain stimulation techniques like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to potentially improve executive function therapies in cognitive disorders.
