Start/Stop Signals Emerge in Nigrostriatal Circuits during Sequence Learning

By Xin Jin, Rui M. Costa. Nature, 2010

615 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Learning new action sequences subserves a plethora of different abilities such as escaping a predator, playing the piano, or producing fluent speech. Proper initiation and termination of each action sequence is critical for the organization of behaviour, and is compromised in nigrostriatal disorders like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases. Using a self-paced operant task in which mice learn to perform a particular sequence of actions to obtain an outcome, we found neural activity in nigrostriatal circuits specifically signalling the initiation or the termination of each action sequence. This start/stop activity emerged during sequence learning, was specific for particular actions, and did not reflect interval timing, movement speed or action value. Furthermore, genetically altering the function of striatal circuits disrupted the development of start/stop activity and selectively impaired sequence learning. These results have important implications for understanding the functional organization of actions and the sequence initiation and termination impairments observed in basal ganglia disorders.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/974e603ce445905d9cadad451d6fcf4ea3850d80

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Citations in the corpus

Whole-brain mapping of direct inputs to midbrain dopamine neurons. (2012, positive): “Furthermore, dopamine neurons increase their firing when an animal initiates reward-oriented behavior (Jin and Costa, 2010).”
Striatal dopamine release is triggered by synchronized activity in cholinergic interneurons. (2012, neutral): “…switches to phasic bursts of DA neuron activity and subsequent DA release encode motivational value and/or salience (Bromberg-Martin et al., 2010; Jin and Costa, 2010; Phillips et al., 2003; Redgrave et al., 2008; Schultz, 2010; Tsai et al., 2009) and regulate long-term changes in striatal…”
DREAM Architecture: a Developmental Approach to Open-Ended Learning in Robotics (2020, neutral): “Mechanistically, it is thought that neural activity related to each individual action, when sequentially activated within short periods of time, can be associated through Hebbian learning within the motor cortex [168, 169], so that after habit acquisition basal ganglia neurons become only active at ”
Dopamine in motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and alerting (2010, methodology): “…1985), perhaps receiving input from different SC and PPTg neurons; that respond to the first or last event in a sequence (Ravel and Richmond, 2006; Jin and Costa, 2010); that have sustained activation by risky rewards (Fiorillo et al., 2003); or that are activated during body movements (Schultz,…”
The necessity of rostrolateral prefrontal cortex for higher-level sequential behavior (2015, positive): “Because of these unique demands, previous work examining the brain areas serving motor-only or cued sequences (Barnes et al., 2005; Fujii and Graybiel, 2003; Jin and Costa, 2010; Smith and Graybiel, 2013) cannot fully elucidate the neural mechanisms for task sequences.”
Circuit Architecture of VTA Dopamine Neurons Revealed by Systematic Input–Output Mapping (2015, background): “Furthermore, important roles for DA neurons were uncovered in numerous behavioral or psychological processes other than reward, including salience, aversion, fear, working memory, and movement coordination (Bromberg-Martin et al., 2010; Jin and Costa, 2010; Zweifel et al., 2011; Lammel et al., 2012;”
Dopamine release in the basal ganglia (2011, background): “…activity encodes prediction-related information about rewards or other salient stimuli (Schultz 1998; Matsumoto and Hikosaka 2009), and is thus important for the acquisition of reinforcement seeking behaviors and selection of habitual motor programs independent of reward (Jin and Costa, 2010).”