Synchronization in the prefrontal–striatal circuit tracks behavioural choice in a go–no‐go task in rats

Abstract

Rodent striatum is involved in sensory-motor transformations and reward-related learning. Lesion studies suggest dorsolateral striatum, dorsomedial striatum and nucleus accumbens underlie stimulus-response transformations, goal-directed behaviour and reward expectation, respectively. In addition, prefrontal inputs likely control these functions. Here, we set out to study how reward-driven behaviour is mediated by the coordinated activity of these structures in the intact brain. We implemented a discrimination task requiring rats to either respond or suppress responding on a lever after the presentation of auditory cues in order to obtain rewards. Single unit activity in the striatal subregions and pre-limbic cortex was recorded using tetrode arrays. Striatal units showed strong onset responses to auditory cues paired with an opportunity to obtain reward. Cue-onset responses in both striatum and cortex were significantly modulated by previous errors suggesting a role of these structures in maintaining appropriate motivation or action selection during ongoing behaviour. Furthermore, failure to respond to the reward-paired tones was associated with higher pre-trial coherence among striatal subregions and between cortex and striatum suggesting a task-negative corticostriatal network whose activity may be suppressed to enable processing of reward-predictive cues. Our findings highlight that coordinated activity in a distributed network including both pre-limbic cortex and multiple striatal regions underlies reward-related decisions.

Spatiotemporal reorganization of corticostriatal networks encodes motor skill learning

“…Rotarod training induced a transient decrease in the DMS response to cortical stimulation after early training. This is in apparent contradiction with previous recordings in DMS showing an increase in activity (Nonomura et al, 2018;Thorn et al, 2010;Yin et al, 2009), but recent publications have also highlighted an inhibition in DMS during the early phase of operant conditioning, particularly during lever-press sequences ( Vandaele et al, 2019) and discrimination (Stubbendorff et al, 2019) tasks. Even though this could be interpreted as a disengagement of DMS, global inhibition could be a mechanism to reveal HA cells and increase the signal-to-noise ratio in the corticostriatal DMS network.…”

Thalamic afferents to prefrontal cortices from ventral motor nuclei in decision‐making

“…A recent study indicates that PrL and striatal activity is associated with responses to reward predicting cues, in particular if failures to respond occur. The authors propose that cue‐related experience‐dependent changes in PrL activity are induced by striatal feedback to cortex (Stubbendorff et al ., ), that is by the thalamo‐cortical input to layer 1.…”

Functional states of prelimbic and related circuits during the acquisition of a GO/noGO task in rats

“…Thus, the DMS is preferentially connected with the mPFC, and mostly involved in the associations between responses and outcomes and the motivational control of goal-directed actions. In contrast, the DLS receives sensorimotor information from the respective cortical areas, and is more related to the proper formation of skilled movements and motor habits by the appropriate association between stimuli and responses (Stalnaker et al, 2010; Graybiel and Grafton, 2015; Corbit and Janak, 2016; Lipton et al, 2019; Stubbendorff et al, 2019; Vandaele et al, 2019). Based on simultaneous unitary recordings from PrL and dorsal striatum neurons, Stubbendorff et al (2019) propose that this functional network also underlies reward-related decisions.…”