Inversely Active Striatal Projection Neurons and Interneurons Selectively Delimit Useful Behavioral Sequences.

ABSTRACT: Understanding neural representations of behavioral routines is critical for understanding complex behavior in health and disease. We demonstrate here that accentuated activity of striatal projection neurons (SPNs) at the beginning and end of such behavioral repertoires is a supraordinate representation specifically marking previously rewarded behavioral sequences independent of the individual movements making up the behavior. We recorded spike activity in the striatum and primary motor cortex as individual rats learned specific rewarded lever-press sequences, each one unique to a given rat. Motor cortical neurons mainly responded in relation to specific movements regardless of their sequence of occurrence. By contrast, striatal SPN populations in each rat fired preferentially at the initia

SUBMITTER: Martiros N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5820126 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature