Concomitant processing of choice and outcome in frontal corticostriatal ensembles correlates with performance of rats [article]

Takashi Handa, Rie Harukuni, Tomoki Fukai
2020 bioRxiv   pre-print
The frontal cortex-basal ganglia network plays a pivotal role in adaptive goal-directed behaviors. Medial frontal cortex (MFC) encodes information about choices and outcomes into sequential activation of neural population, or neural trajectory. While MFC projects to the dorsal striatum (DS), whether DS also displays temporally coordinated activity remains unknown. We studied this question by simultaneously recording neural ensembles in the MFC and DS of rodents performing an outcome-based
more » ... ative choice task. We found that the two regions exhibited highly parallel evolution of neural trajectories, transforming choice information into outcome-related information. When the two trajectories were highly correlated, spike synchrony was task-dependently modulated in some MFC-DS neuron pairs. Our results suggest that neural trajectories concomitantly process decision-relevant information in MFC and DS with increased spike synchrony between these regions.
doi:10.1101/2020.05.01.071852 fatcat:7lcek5oq3rcmzn57pvrmgb6rta