Human subthalamic nucleus activity during non-motor decision making

Abstract
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Abstract

Recent studies have implicated the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in decisions that involve inhibiting movements. Many of the decisions that we make in our daily lives, however, do not involve any motor actions. We studied non-motor decision making by recording intraoperative STN and prefrontal cortex (PFC) electrophysiology as participants perform a novel task that required them to decide whether to encode items into working memory. During all encoding trials, beta band (15-30 Hz) activity decreased in the STN and PFC, and this decrease was progressively enhanced as more items were stored into working memory. Crucially, the STN and lateral PFC beta decrease was significantly attenuated during the trials in which participants were instructed not to encode the presented stimulus. These changes were associated with increase lateral PFC-STN coherence and altered STN neuronal spiking. Our results shed light on why states of altered basal ganglia activity disrupt both motor function and cognition.

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The following data sets were generated

(2017) Human subthalamic nucleus activity during non-motor decision making
Publicly available.

https://neuroscience.nih.gov/ninds/zaghloul/downloads.html

Article and author information

Author details

Baltazar A Zavala

Surgical Neurology Branch, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Bethesda, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Anthony I Jang

Surgical Neurology Branch, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Bethesda, United States

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Kareem A Zaghloul

Surgical Neurology Branch, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, Bethesda, United States

For correspondence
kareem.zaghloul@nih.gov

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-8575-3578

Funding

National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (Intramural Research Program)

Kareem A Zaghloul

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: The study was conducted in accordance with an NIH IRB approved protocol (11-N-0211), and all participants gave their written informed consent to take part in the study. Participants received no financial compensation for their participation.

Copyright

This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.