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The basal ganglia are a set of subcortical structures that interact with the cerebral cortex to regulate motor, cognitive and affective function through reinforcement learning and action selection. Its input structure, the striatum, receives a dense dopaminergic input that is critical for reinforcement learning and whose dysfunction contributes to motor and cognitive pathologies.
How movement speed is neurally modulated remains poorly understood. Here, the authors recorded invasive brain signals in Parkinson’s disease patients during drawing and deep brain stimulation, showing a context-dependent relationship between reductions of movement acceleration and dynamic activity of the basal ganglia.
How the brain transforms reward information into actions remains poorly understood. Here, the authors found that reward expectation and sensorimotor signals are more pronounced in the output of the basal ganglia than its input or the cerebellar cortex, implying that the transformation of reward signals into motor signals is not hierarchically organized.
Axons of striatal dopaminergic neurons are shown to release dopamine in a RIM-dependent manner and with a high release probability from axonal active zone-like structures.
The activity of neurons in the basal ganglia contributes to the weighting of speed versus accuracy, rather than to deliberation, in a motor decision-making task.
