Behavioral and anatomical consequences of small intrastriatal injections of kainic acid in the rat

Re-thinking the role of the dorsal striatum in egocentric/response strategy

“…The alteration of attention and/or sensory processing, may strengthen response, place, or cue strategies, depending on the surrounding environment. Such an explanation could account for the contradictory results in the literature concerning the role of dorsal striatum in egocentric discriminations (Potegal, 1969;Cook and Kesner, 1988;Kesner et al, 1993;DeCoteau and Kesner, 2000versus Divac et al, 1967, 1978Kirkby, 1969;Pisa and Cyr, 1990;Oliveira et al, 1997).…”

“…This position has, however, been challenged by other studies postulating that dorsal striatum is not involved in egocentric discriminations (Divac et al, 1967(Divac et al, , 1978Kirkby, 1969;Pisa and Cyr, 1990;Oliveira et al, 1997). One reason for these contradictory results may be the heterogeneous nature of the dorsal striatum which is divided mainly into two distinct subregions.…”

The Dorsomedial Striatum Reflects Response Bias during Learning

“…The striatum might thus control the level of exploratory behavior emitted by the animal, especially when the outcome of a given action has become uncertain. Such a role for the basal ganglia in generating spontaneous variations in behavior has been proposed during birdsong learning (Kao et al, 2005) and may also explain classic effects of striatal lesions of the striatum on spontaneous alternation behavior (Chorover and Gross, 1963;Divac et al, 1978). From a theoretical perspective, bias-related changes in striatal activity could enable plasticity in cortical systems that receive projections from thalamic areas innervated by the basal ganglia, as proposed in a leading theory of basal ganglia function by Houk and Wise (1995) and also in a computational model of birdsong learning (Troyer and Doupe, 2000).…”

Selective Antibody-Induced Cholinergic Cell and Synapse Loss Produce Sustained Hippocampal and Cortical Hypometabolism with Correlated Cognitive Deficits

“…Some of the behavioral correlations, such as with local cerebral metabolism in the dorsomedial striatum and substantia nigra may not be easily understood from simple anatomical single circuit diagrams. However, much of this spatial and mnemonic processing obviously is going through a number of dependent circuitries and certainly striatum is an important component in subcortical processing, also for cognition (see 17,33,78), and could therefore have some relevance to the overall performance of the lesioned rats. The increased correlation to performance with substantia nigra in the lesioned rats is harder to interpret, but stands as a possible downstream effector region for the many consequences of impaired performance, such as is seen in locomotor hyperactivity of rats with cholinergic deficits or after atropine treatment, and may therefore be ex-plained as a hyperactivity syndrome.…”