Aberrant prefrontal activity and arousal level correlate with action initiation and response vigor in rats.

Overview

1. Helsinki Institute of Life Science (HiLIFE), University of Helsinki, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
2. Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Helsinki, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
3. Neuroscience Center, University of Helsinki, 00014 Helsinki, Finland
4. Department of Physiology of Cognitive Processes, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, 72076 Tübingen, Germany
5. Department of Systems Innovation, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-8654, Japan

Abstract

Orchestrating learned stimulus-response (S-R) mappings is a central function of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), as evidenced by S-R selective neuronal activity during correct task performance. During errors, the “wrong” neurons are aberrantly activated. While movement vigor has been related to basal ganglia neural activity, the neural correlates linking S-R mappings to vigor remain elusive. We trained male rats to perform a head-fixed Go/NoGo task on a treadmill, enabling the recording of PFC single-unit spiking and running speed. Aberrant activation of the “wrong” S-R mapping predicts the initiation of incorrect responses, and the vigor of those responses scales with the strength of the aberrant stimulus-evoked activity. We show that such responses occur in the context of heightened arousal, addressing a classic but under-tested hypothesis linking arousal to vigor. These findings directly relate S-R mappings to response vigor and show how arousal is co-modulated with this relationship.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY-NC), from the paper cited above.

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Data

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Data and code availability

Behavior, treadmill velocity, pupillometry, single unit spiking data, and code used to perform the analyses and visualize the results have been deposited at https://etsin.fairdata.fi/ and are publicly available as of the date of publication. Etsin Data: https://doi.org/10.23729/fd-fde5397b-d01f-368a-9be1-a750d5f4d589.

Any additional information required to reanalyze the data reported in this paper is available from the lead contact upon request.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY-NC), from the paper cited above.

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Version 1, 29 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 5 authors, 4 keywords, 5 funders, 38 references.

Cite

This paper

Klein, F. J., Vasilev, D., Iwai, R., Watanabe, M., & Totah, N. K. (2026). Aberrant prefrontal activity and arousal level correlate with action initiation and response vigor in rats. iScience, 29(6), 115804. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.115804

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