Prefrontal cortical microcircuitsfor executive control of behavior

Abstract

During the perception-to-action cycle, our cerebral cortex mediates the interactions between the environment and the perceptual-executive systems of the brain. At the top of the executive hierarchy, prefrontal cortical microcircuits are assumed to bind perceptual and executive control information to guide goal-driven behavior. Here, we discuss new results that show the involvement of prefrontalcortical inter-laminar microcircuits in the executive control of behavior. Recent results show that during perception and executive selection phases, cell firing in the localized prefrontal layers and caudate-putamen region exhibited a similar location preference on spatial-trials, but less on object- trials. When the perceptual-executive microcircuit became facilitated by electrically micro-stimulating the prefrontal infra-granular-cell layers with signal patterns previously derived from neuron firing in the supra-granular-layers, it was shown to produce stimulation-induced spatial preference (similar to neural tuning) in the percent correct performance only duringspatial trials. These results suggested that inter-laminar prefrontal microcircuits play causal roles to the executive control of behavior across the perceptionto- action cycle.