Activation of the cholinergic system endows compositional properties to striatal cell assemblies

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience
• Systems Neuroscience

Background:

• Striatal cell assemblies are implicated in associative learning, procedural memory, and behavioral sequencing.
• Cholinergic neurotransmission is known to modulate memory functions across brain structures.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if striatal microcircuits exhibit properties necessary for composing memory traces.
• To explore the role of cholinergic modulation in the activity of striatal neuron pools.

Main Methods:

• Whole-cell recordings and calcium imaging in living nervous tissue.
• Multidimensional reduction techniques and vectorization of network dynamics.
• Graph theory analysis of striatal network states.

Main Results:

• Cholinergic system activation endows striatal cell assemblies with properties similar to memory-storing recurrent neural artificial networks.
• Analysis revealed recursive dynamics in network states, resembling closed reverberating cycles.
• Identified modular architecture and hierarchical organization within these network cycles.

Conclusions:

• The cholinergic system enables the striatal microcircuit to compose complex activity sequences.
• These neuronal recurrent networks may facilitate the consolidation of activity sequences into memories.
• Repeated memories, supported by these networks, could form learned motor procedures.