Thalamic-prefrontal cortical-ventral striatal circuitry mediates dissociable components of strategy set shifting.

The mediodorsal nuclei of thalamus (MD), prefrontal cortex (PFC), and nucleus accumbens core (NAc) form an interconnected network that may work together to subserve certain forms of behavioral flexibility. The present study investigated the functional interactions between these regions during performance of a cross-maze-based strategy set-shifting task. In Experiment 1, reversible bilateral inactivation of the MD via infusions of bupivacaine did not impair simple discrimination learning, but did disrupt shifting from response to visual cue discrimination strategy, and vice versa.