The effects of chloride homeostasis can explain diverse responses of basal ganglia output neurons to putatively inhibitory inputs and may tune these neurons' synchrony, oscillations and behavior in decision-making scenarios.
Two regions of the frontal lobe – the anterior cingulate cortex and, unexpectedly, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – show coordinated rhythmic activity during REM sleep.
A mouse with a defined mutation in an extracellular matrix protein that is expressed in selected neurons sheds light on circuit abnormalities producing transient hyperkinetic movements.
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.
Reward-related cues elicit phasic changes in activity in ventral pallidum neurons, which predict and functionally contribute to the speed of behaviors trained on the basis of act-outcome, but not stimulus-outcome, contingencies.
Computational modeling suggests that feedback between striatal cholinergic neurons and spiny neurons dynamically adjusts learning rates to optimize behavior in a variable world.