Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute, Bethesda, United States.
INSERM, CNRS Institut de la Vision, Paris, France.
Elife. 2020 Sep 17;9:e53998. doi: 10.7554/eLife.53998.
Recent work has implicated the primate basal ganglia in visual perception and attention, in addition to their traditional role in motor control. The basal ganglia, especially the caudate nucleus 'head' (CDh) of the striatum, receive indirect anatomical connections from the superior colliculus (SC), a midbrain structure that is known to play a crucial role in the control of visual attention. To test the possible functional relationship between these subcortical structures, we recorded CDh neuronal activity of macaque monkeys before and during unilateral SC inactivation in a spatial attention task. SC inactivation significantly altered the attention-related modulation of CDh neurons and strongly impaired the classification of task-epochs based on CDh activity. Only inactivation of SC on the same side of the brain as recorded CDh neurons, not the opposite side, had these effects. These results demonstrate a novel interaction between SC activity and attention-related visual processing in the basal ganglia.
最近的研究表明，除了在运动控制方面的传统作用外，灵长类动物的基底神经节还参与了视觉感知和注意力。基底神经节，特别是纹状体的尾状核头部（CDh），从中脑结构上丘（SC）接收间接的解剖连接，已知上丘在视觉注意力控制中起着至关重要的作用。为了测试这些皮质下结构之间可能的功能关系，我们在空间注意力任务中记录了单侧 SC 失活前后猕猴 CDh 神经元的活动。SC 失活显著改变了 CDh 神经元的注意力相关调制，并严重损害了基于 CDh 活动的任务阶段分类。只有记录 CDh 神经元所在脑侧的 SC 失活，而不是对侧的 SC 失活，才会产生这些影响。这些结果表明，SC 活动与基底神经节中的注意力相关视觉处理之间存在新的相互作用。
