Background-Adult animals with a neonatal ventral hippocampal lesion (NVHL) exhibit deficits in working memory and sensorimotor gating similar to those observed in schizophrenia. As cognitive deficits in this disorder are typically associated with changes in cortical metabolic levels, we investigated here whether an NVHL affects metabolic responses to ventral tegmental area (VTA) activation, a procedure that elicits abnormal cell firing in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of NVHL animals.