, 2007). The emerging picture is that there is some overlap in the function of the ACC and these other areas, perhaps not surprisingly given their anatomical interconnection (Van Hoesen et al., 1993), but that there are also ways in which they this website differ. The anatomical connections of ACC provide one important insight into how its function might differ from lOFC. The rostral cingulate motor area is connected to primary motor cortex, several premotor areas, and even to the ventral horn of the spinal cord (Van Hoesen et al., 1993 and Morecraft and Tanji, 2009). Such connections mean that it is better

placed to influence action selection and to be influenced by action selection, than lOFC. By contrast, ACC has far fewer connections with inferior temporal and perirhinal areas concerned with object recognition than does lOFC (Kondo et al., 2005, Saleem et al., 2008 and Yukie and Shibata, 2009). Consistent with

these differences in connections, lesion studies in the macaque have shown that ACC and lOFC are relatively more specialized for learning action-reward and stimulus-reward associations (Rudebeck et al., 2008). Ostlund and Balleine (2007) have reported a possibly similar relative specialization for learning action-reward and stimulus-reward associations in a medial frontal cortex area, the prelimbic cortex, and in the rat’s OFC. Neurophysiological studies have also shown that ACC neurons Selisistat research buy Calpain have response properties that would allow them to associate actions with rewards. Hayden and Platt (2010) report that ACC neurons that are reward sensitive are also tuned for the direction of saccades at the time that the saccades are made and reward is received even if they are not tuned in this way at earlier times during motor planning. Kennerley et al. (2009) reported a greater number of response-selective

neurons in ACC than in OFC when both areas were investigated in the same paradigm in the same individual monkeys. Exactly how vmPFC/mOFC and ACC interact during reward-guided decision-making remains unclear. The two regions are anatomically interconnected (Van Hoesen et al., 1993 and Morecraft and Tanji, 2009). Moreover, vmPFC/mOFC activity reflects the expected value of a choice whether the choice is made between stimuli or actions (Gläscher et al., 2009 and Wunderlich et al., 2010). One possibility is that while vmPFC/mOFC determines the reward goal that is to be pursued the ACC is particularly concerned with the association between reward and action and the determination of the action that is to be made to obtain the goal. In many experiments the process of choosing a reward goal is confounded with the choice of an action to achieve the goal but these two aspects of selection can be separated. Another possibility is that ACC is encoding a parameter related to the rate at which reward is being received per response.