The cerebral cortex of the rat and visual attentional function: dissociable effects of mediofrontal, cingulate, anterior dorsolateral, and parietal cortex lesions on a five-choice serial reaction time task

Dissociable effects of bilateral excitotoxic lesions of different regions of the rat neocortex, including medial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, were investigated in a five-choice serial reaction time task that provides several indices of the accuracy and speed of attentional function. Whereas medial prefrontal cortical lesions impaired perfor-mance of the task as revealed by a reduction in choice accuracy, an increase in the latency to respond correctly to the visual target and enhanced perseverative responding, lesions of the anterior cingulate cortex specifically increased premature responding. By contrast lat-eral frontal cortical lesions did not significantly disrupt baseline per-formance of the task, but rather increased the latency to respond cor-rectly to the visual target during various behavioral manipulations, for example, when the length of the intertrial interval was varied unpre-dictably and during interpolation of distracting bursts of white noise. Lesions of the parietal cortex failed to disrupt any aspect of tas