Striatal visual responses increase prior to visuomotor learning

The cortex and basal ganglia exhibit interdependent changes during learning. However, it is not clear whether plasticity occurs sequentially or concurrently across these structures. To address this question, we simultaneously recorded cortical and striatal activity while training mice on a visuomotor association task that involved turning a wheel to move a stimulus from a cue position to a target position. Prior to the development of learned behavior, context-independent visual responses increased in the visual-recipient striatum. This was followed by the emergence of context-dependent stimulus responses in both the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the mPFC-recipient striatum at the onset of learned behavior. All of these regions also exhibited increased responses to stimuli in the rewarded target position. However, while the visual-recipient striatum was non-selective between cue and target stimuli, the mPFC and mPFC-recipient striatum switched from being target-stimulus responsive before learning to being cue-stimulus responsive after learning. Our results suggest that sensorimotor learning involves routing stimulus information first to the sensory striatum and then to frontal motor circuits.