Frontal Cortex and Response Suppression in the Rat

Abstract

Parts of the rails neocortex were mapped for sites where electrical stimulation, square waves at 10/sec, will suppress a bar-press response for food. Effective sites were found in the frontal pole and over most of the frontal dorsolateral cortex. Within these regions the strongest inhibitory influences were at sites in the frontal pole and adjacent frontal cortex, and at sites along the midline. These data generally agree with results of previous cortical ablation studies, but they suggest that inhibitory processes are more widespread in the dorsolateral cortex than these studies indicated.