Volitional Modulation of Primary Visual Cortex Activity Requires the Basal Ganglia

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Behavioral Science
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Instrumental conditioning is a key mechanism for behavior acquisition.
• Brain-machine interfaces typically target frontal and motor cortices for neural activity reinforcement.
• Emerging evidence suggests primary sensory cortices may also support internally driven processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if primary sensory cortices, specifically the primary visual cortex (V1), can be trained using instrumental conditioning.
• To determine the role of basal ganglia, particularly the dorsomedial striatum (DMS), in learning to generate V1 activity for reward.

Main Methods:

• Rats and mice were trained to produce arbitrary neural activity patterns in V1 to control an auditory cursor for reward.
• Optogenetic inhibition was used to selectively target neurons in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) and dorsolateral striatum (DLS) during learning.
• The effect of DMS inhibition on V1 activity production was assessed after learning.

Main Results:

• Animals successfully learned to generate specific V1 neural activity patterns to obtain rewards.
• Learning was impaired by optogenetic inhibition of DMS neurons but not DLS neurons.
• Inhibition of DMS after learning did not disrupt the production of rewarded V1 activity patterns.

Conclusions:

• Primary visual cortex (V1) can be a target for instrumental conditioning to learn arbitrary behaviors.
• The dorsomedial striatum (DMS) plays a critical role in the acquisition of reward-driven V1 neural activity.
• Cortico-basal ganglia circuits are essential for learning to generate cortical activity that leads to desired outcomes.