Department of Physiology, Hokkaido University School of Medicine, Sapporo, Japan.
Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, United States.
Elife. 2019 Sep 6;8:e48702. doi: 10.7554/eLife.48702.
Rhythmic events recruit neuronal activity in the basal ganglia and cerebellum, but their roles remain elusive. In monkeys attempting to detect a single omission of isochronous visual stimulus, we found that neurons in the caudate nucleus showed increased activity for each stimulus in sequence, while those in the cerebellar dentate nucleus showed decreased activity. Firing modulation in the majority of caudate neurons and all cerebellar neurons was proportional to the stimulus interval, but a quarter of caudate neurons displayed a clear duration tuning. Furthermore, the time course of population activity in the cerebellum well predicted stimulus timing, whereas that in the caudate reflected stochastic variation of response latency. Electrical stimulation to the respective recording sites confirmed a causal role in the detection of stimulus omission. These results suggest that striatal neurons might represent periodic response preparation while cerebellar nuclear neurons may play a role in temporal prediction of periodic events.
节律性事件会招募基底神经节和小脑的神经元活动，但它们的作用仍难以捉摸。在试图检测到单个等时视觉刺激缺失的猴子中，我们发现尾状核中的神经元在每个刺激序列中表现出活动增加，而齿状核中的神经元表现出活动减少。大多数尾状核神经元和所有小脑神经元的放电调制与刺激间隔成正比，但四分之一的尾状核神经元表现出明显的持续时间调谐。此外，小脑群体活动的时间过程很好地预测了刺激时间，而尾状核的时间过程反映了反应潜伏期的随机变化。对相应记录部位的电刺激证实了在检测刺激缺失中的因果作用。这些结果表明，纹状体神经元可能代表周期性反应准备，而小脑核神经元可能在周期性事件的时间预测中发挥作用。
