Optical recordings reveal previously unknown neuromodulator dynamics in the striatum during animal movements that suggest a new interpretation of the underpinnings of bradykinetic movements exhibited in Parkinson's Disease patients.
Direct and indirect pathway neurons in posterior dorsomedial striatum were found to play distinct roles, with the former necessary for encoding and the latter for updating goal-directed learning.
The numerous reports in support of action-value representation in the striatum are based on statistical analyses that are subject to two critical confounds and, thus, this long-held belief of striatal action-value representation should be retested using different experiments and analyses.
Dorsomedial and dorsolateral striatal neural activity differ during early learning of action sequences but do not change with performance improvement across sessions, and become similar after extended training.
Dopamine signals in the ventral, dorsomedial, and dorsolateral striatum are modulated by various variables, such as stimulus-associated value, choice, confidence, but these modulations can be inclusively explained by TD errors.
Analysis of slow wave brain state unravels the functional connectivity and the biological substrate of the rodent dorsolateral and dorsomedial striatum, demonstrating its organization in two non-overlapping circuits.
The first comprehensive map of all excitatory inputs to the mouse striatum is presented and used to define and demarcate striatal subdivisions, including a previous unappreciated novel subdivision in the posterior striatum.
Computational modeling suggests that feedback between striatal cholinergic neurons and spiny neurons dynamically adjusts learning rates to optimize behavior in a variable world.
Dopamine novelty signals are localized in the posterior tail of the striatum along with general salience signals, while dopamine in the ventral striatum reliably encodes reward prediction error.
Dopamine neurons projecting to different targets receive a similar set of inputs, rather than forming reciprocal connections, whereas those projecting to the posterior striatum receive a distinct set of inputs.
