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

M. CECILIA MARTINEZ; GUSTAVO MURER; MARIANO BELLUSCIO

Congreso; XXXIII Congreso Anual Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias 2018; 2018

Corticostriatal circuits are involved in the selection and executionof sequences of movements in order to maximize the profit derivedfrom them. With the aim of studying how actions are triggered at theright time in a self-initiated rewarded task, we used tetrodes torecord the striatal activity. Briefly, after a minimum inter-trialinterval (ITI), water-deprived rats must enter a nosepoke and,following a visual cue, emit an eight-licks sequence onto a tube toreceive water. First, we found a modulation of the striatal activitythat peaks right before the beginning of the trials. This activity isrelated to the waiting time and it differs between timely andpremature nosepoke entries. Interestingly, such activity profile wasalso observed when the ITI was duplicated. In a third series ofexperiments, subjects had to enter the nosepoke in a restricted timewindow: if they entered prematurely or late, they received no reward.In this version of the task we found that the anticipatory activitywas maximum when the animal entered the nosepoke within the rewardedtime window. Considering that subjects must estimate the right timeto perform a sequence of actions to obtain the reward, we hypothesizethat this anticipatory neuronal activity codes for the rewardexpectancy associated to the time chosen for the initiation of thelearned action and it is involved in its timely execution.p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 115%; }