Date of Completion

Spring 5-1-2026

Thesis Advisor(s)

Timothy Spellman

Honors Major

Psychology

Disciplines

Biological Psychology | Cognitive Science | Neurosciences | Psychiatry and Psychology

Abstract

Cognitive flexibility is an executive function that involves dynamically adapting behavior in the face of changing environmental circumstances to achieve a particular goal. Disrupted in numerous psychiatric disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, OCD, and depression, the neural correlates of cognitive flexibility are not well understood. However, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is strongly implicated in executive function and attentional control processes. Thus, we sought to examine the neural circuitry involved in distinct cognitive flexibility tasks – the attentional set-shifting task and the probabilistic 2-armed bandit task. Through optogenetic suppression, we targeted pyramidal neurons of the rodent medial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with outcome and reward encoding in decision-making, during rule switches vs. rule execution during both tasks. We found that optogenetic suppression did not produce the same impairment across both task conditions: light ON did not significantly alter serial extradimensional set-shifting performance but was associated with reduced accuracy and increased trials-to-criterion in the probabilistic 2-armed bandit following a rule switch. However, the contribution of non-specific light-related effects cannot be excluded, as well as reduced power due to low sample size. Additionally, exploratory in vivo two-photon calcium imaging of the medial prefrontal cortex suggested that some neurons may show choice or outcome-related activity across the distinct tasks. This project pushes our understanding of the neural encoding involved in diverse decision-making contexts. Identifying neurons that encode outcomes during cognitive flexibility is crucial for informing therapeutic strategies for psychiatric disorders characterized by executive dysfunction.

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