, 2010). Such signals can be combined within the area’s circuitry

with incoming sensory information into a saliency map that reflects the organism’s priorities and goals. Signals originating within this map can then modulate (via direct or indirect pathways; Petrides and Pandya [2007]) the responses of neurons in sensory areas representing target and distracter features (Ardid et al., 2007, Gregoriou et al., 2009, Olivers, 2008 and Rainer et al., 1998). One question that remains to be answered is whether there is a distinctive role for dlPFC and FEF neurons in attentional control. One possibility is that the dlPFC plays a role in forms of attentional modulation that require selectivity for nonspatial features of visual stimuli

(i.e., feature-based-attention; Bichot et al., 2005 and Treue and Martinez Trujillo, click here 1999; or object-based attention; Roelfsema et al. [1998]), whereas the FEF plays a role in selleck compound allocating spatial attention (Moore and Armstrong, 2003). Favoring this hypothesis, selectivity for nonspatial features such as motion direction has been documented in dlPFC neurons (Zaksas and Pasternak, 2006). A second possibility is that the dlPFC integrates signals from different sensory modalities into a single saliency map and then signals FEF neurons the target and distracter locations. Favoring this idea, it has been recently reported that neurons in the ferret prefrontal cortex shape the flow of auditory information during a behavioral task (Fritz et al., 2010). In sum, our results agree with previous studies reporting that dlPFC neurons encode the allocation of attention through their

firing patterns (Boussaoud and Wise, 1993, di Pellegrino and Wise, 1993, Everling et al., 2002, Lebedev et al., 2004 and Rainer et al., 1998). Importantly, they further support a role of the primate prefrontal cortex on inhibitory control of behavior (Aron et al., 2004, Hasegawa et al., 2004 and Sakagami et al., 2006). We found that the response suppression of distracter representations in these units produces changes in their filtering performance similar to the ones observed in the organism’s behavior. It remains to be determined what the exact neuron-to-neuron interactions within dlPFC networks underlying the observed patterns of response suppression, are as well why as whether manipulating such interactions leads to changes in behavioral performance. Two young adult male monkeys (Macaca mulatta, Ra: 7 kg; Se: 9 kg) participated in the experiments. During the training and testing periods, the animals received their daily amounts of fluids (fruit juice) as reward for correctly performing the task. The average fluid intake during a session was between 300 and 400 ml. We also gave the animals fresh fruits as supplement when finishing a session. Body weights were measured on a daily basis to monitor health and growth.