Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
Champalimaud Research, Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, Lisbon 1400-038, Portugal.
Neuron. 2018 Mar 21;97(6):1356-1368.e4. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2018.01.051. Epub 2018 Mar 1.
Animals acquire behaviors through instrumental conditioning. Brain-machine interfaces have used instrumental conditioning to reinforce patterns of neural activity directly, especially in frontal and motor cortices, which are a rich source of signals for voluntary action. However, evidence suggests that activity in primary sensory cortices may also reflect internally driven processes, instead of purely encoding antecedent stimuli. Here, we show that rats and mice can learn to produce arbitrary patterns of neural activity in their primary visual cortex to control an auditory cursor and obtain reward. Furthermore, learning was prevented when neurons in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS), which receives input from visual cortex, were optogenetically inhibited, but not during inhibition of nearby neurons in the dorsolateral striatum. After learning, DMS inhibition did not affect production of the rewarded patterns. These data demonstrate that cortico-basal ganglia circuits play a general role in learning to produce cortical activity that leads to desirable outcomes.
动物通过工具性条件作用获得行为。脑机接口已经使用工具性条件作用来直接强化神经活动模式，特别是在前额和运动皮层，这些区域是自愿行动的丰富信号源。然而，有证据表明，初级感觉皮层的活动也可能反映内部驱动的过程，而不是纯粹编码先前的刺激。在这里，我们表明，大鼠和小鼠可以学习在其初级视觉皮层中产生任意的神经活动模式，以控制听觉光标并获得奖励。此外，当从视觉皮层接收输入的背内侧纹状体（DMS）中的神经元被光遗传学抑制时，学习会受到阻止，但在抑制附近的背外侧纹状体中的神经元时则不会。在学习之后，DMS 抑制并不影响奖励模式的产生。这些数据表明，皮质基底节回路在学习产生导致期望结果的皮质活动方面起着一般作用。
