• c-fos
• extradimensional set-shifting task
• flessibilità cognitiva

Attentional set-shifting is a cognitive process which involves ignoring established stimulus-reinforcement contingencies and shifting attention to a previously irrelevant stimulus. This project aimed to individuate the activation of specific rat brain regions activated during the extradimensional set-shifting (EDS) through the utilization of the immediate-early gene c-fos, expressed in the central nervous sysstem following neuronal activation.
We analyzed several brain regions among which some of them have been already implicated in behavioral flexibility: prefrontal cortex (cingulate, prelimbic, infralimbic, lateral orbital and ventral orbital cortices); striatum (dorsal medial and dorsal lateral striatum, and nucleus accumbens core, shell and lateral shell); hippocampal formation (dorsal part CA1, CA3, DG and ventral part CA1, CA3, DG, dorsal and ventral subiculum); amygdala (basolateral and central nuclei); substantia nigra (pars compacta and pars reticulata); ventral tegmentum; neuromodulatori nuclei of the brain stem as locus coeruleus, dorsal raphé, the cholinergic latero-dorsal tegmental and dorso-tegmental nuclei.
In particular, EDS involves switching attention between two different dimensions. Fifteen rats were trained in a visual discrimination task (VC) and five of them were further trained in a spatial alternation task (AL). During the AL rats were required to ignore the initially relevant dimension (visual cues) and follow an alternate egocentric performance. The rat was believed to has learned after a criterion of 12 consecutive correct responses. Rats were perfused during a 90 minutes time-lapse window after learning since it allows to detect and count the number of c-fos stained nuclei, and thus quantify neuronal activation during the tasks. Brains were removed and cut into 40 micrometers coronal sections and stained using a standard c-fos antibody protocol. Regions of interest were determined using cresyl violet sections and cells were counted semi-automatically with ImageJ Fiji program by two experimenters blind to treatment groups.
We found differences between the VC and AL group in correspondence of the cingulate, prelimbic and infralimbic cortices, the dorsal medial striatum, and the nucleus accumbens core, the ventral subiculum and the central nuclei of the amygdala.