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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.
Dopamine release occurs in spatiotemporal waves. Here the authors propose that dopamine waves arise locally in the striatum, and provide evidence for striatal acetylcholine waves.
In male zebra finches, dopamine responses in Area X are retuned away from self-evaluation of song performance and towards social feedback to song performance when females are present.
Striatal dopamine release is correlated with reward expectation in rats, providing further insights into the mechanism of the basal ganglia circuitry underlying reward-based action selection and execution.
In rats performing automatic and flexible cue-guided motor sequences, the basal ganglia help shape low-level movement kinematics but are dispensable for high-level sequencing of cue-guided behaviors.
Inferring behavior encoding in the striatum is limited by divergent conclusions from correlative and causative experiments. Here, the authors show that behaviors are signaled by concomitant activations and inhibitions of direct and indirect pathway neurons.
The authors establish a connection between functional subtypes and genetic subtypes of dopamine neurons in mice and demonstrate that molecular expression patterns can serve as a common framework to dissect dopaminergic functions.
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.
