Neuronal activity of the dorsal striatum involved in the timely execution of actions

MARTINEZ MC; MURER MG; BELLUSCIO MA

cordoba

Conferencia; XXXIII CONGRESO ANUAL SAN 2018; 2018

Sociedad Argentina de Investigacón en Neurociencias

Corticostriatal circuits are involved in the selection and execution of sequences of movements inorder to maximize the profit derived from them. With the aim of studying how actions aretriggered at the right time in a self initiated rewarded task, we used tetrodes to record the striatalactivity. Briefly, aft er a minimum inter trial interval (ITI), water deprived rats must enter anosepoke and, following a visual cue, emit an eight licks sequence onto a tube to receive water.First, we found a modulation of the striatal activity that peaks right before the beg inning of thetrials. This activity is related to the waiting time and it differs between timely and prematurenosepoke entries. Interestingly, such activity profile was also observed when the ITI wasduplicated. In a third series of experiments, subjects had to enter the nosepoke in a restrictedtime window: if they entered prematurely or late, they received no reward. In this version of thetask we found that the anticipatory activity was maximum when the animal entered the nosepokewithin the rewarded ti me window. Considering that subjects must estimate the right time toperform a sequence of actions to obtain the reward, we hypothesize that this anticipatoryneuronal activity codes for the reward expectancy associated to the time chosen for the initiatio nof the learned action and it is involved in its timely execution.