ReviewNeural structures underlying set-shifting: Roles of medial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex

•Thoroughly outline attentional set-shifting tasks across many animal models.•Summarize research findings in set-shifting literature.•Propose new directions and necessary experiments to fill in important gaps in literature.

Impaired attentional set-shifting and inflexible decision-making are problems frequently observed during normal aging and in several psychiatric disorders. To understand the neuropathophysiology of underlying inflexible behavior, animal models of attentional set-shifting have been developed to mimic tasks such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST), which tap into a number of cognitive functions including stimulus-response encoding, working memory, attention, error detection, and conflict resolution. Here, we review many of these tasks in several different species and speculate on how prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex might contribute to normal performance during set-shifting.

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