Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA; Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Cell. 2018 Jun 28;174(1):44-58.e17. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.04.019. Epub 2018 May 17.
Many naturalistic behaviors are built from modular components that are expressed sequentially. Although striatal circuits have been implicated in action selection and implementation, the neural mechanisms that compose behavior in unrestrained animals are not well understood. Here, we record bulk and cellular neural activity in the direct and indirect pathways of dorsolateral striatum (DLS) as mice spontaneously express action sequences. These experiments reveal that DLS neurons systematically encode information about the identity and ordering of sub-second 3D behavioral motifs; this encoding is facilitated by fast-timescale decorrelations between the direct and indirect pathways. Furthermore, lesioning the DLS prevents appropriate sequence assembly during exploratory or odor-evoked behaviors. By characterizing naturalistic behavior at neural timescales, these experiments identify a code for elemental 3D pose dynamics built from complementary pathway dynamics, support a role for DLS in constructing meaningful behavioral sequences, and suggest models for how actions are sculpted over time.
许多自然行为是由顺序表达的模块化组件构建而成的。尽管纹状体电路与动作选择和执行有关，但在不受约束的动物中组成行为的神经机制尚不清楚。在这里，我们记录了背外侧纹状体（DLS）的直接和间接通路中的整体和细胞神经活动，因为小鼠会自发地表达动作序列。这些实验表明，DLS 神经元系统地编码了关于亚秒 3D 行为模式的身份和顺序的信息；这种编码是通过直接和间接通路之间的快速时间尺度去相关来促进的。此外，DLS 的损伤会阻止在探索或气味诱发的行为期间进行适当的序列组装。通过在神经时间尺度上对自然行为进行特征描述，这些实验为从互补通路动力学构建的基本 3D 姿势动力学确定了一个代码，支持 DLS 在构建有意义的行为序列中的作用，并为动作如何随时间塑造提供了模型。
