Fronto-striatal circuits and disorders of goal-directed motor behaviour

FACUNDO MANES; RAMÓN LEIGUARDA

Higher-order motor disorders: from neuroanatomy and neurobiology to clinical neurology

Oxford University Press

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2005; p. 413 - 439

The basal ganglia receive inputs from a wide variety of neocortical domains that subserve not only motor but also sensory, limbic, and associative functions (Parent and Hazrati 1995a,b). Therefore the basal ganglia process information associated with higher functions accompanying motor behaviour including learning, memory, attention, motivation, emotion, and volitional behaviour (Evarts and Wise 1984; Rolls 1994; Saper 1996; Schultz et al. 2000) The main driving force of the basal ganglia is the frontal cortex. The frontostriatal projections are organized in multiple parallel reverberating circuits which appear to maintain many of the physiological an behavioural properties of the cortical areas that they subserve (Alexander et al. 1986). Therefore, this circuitry subserves many of the motor, cognitive, emotional, and motivated functions involved in goal-directed behaviour. Thus-goal directed behaviour is understood as a set of related processes by which an internal state (derived from an internal or external event) is translated, through action, into de attainment of a goal (Brown and Pluck 2000). Damage to diverse circuit structures (i.e. basal ganglia, thalamus, frontal lobes) may cause similar abnormalities in planned motivated motor behaviour (Cummngs 1993). Moreover, patients with mayor psychiatric diseases such as schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorders, depression, and mania exhibit a spectrum of disorders of gola-directed actions which are strikingly similar from the phenomenological viewpoint to those observed in patients with frontal lobe and basal ganglion damage.