The caudate nucleus contributes causally to decisions that balance reward and uncertain visual information

eLife

Yunshu Fan¹  Long Ding²  Takahiro Doi³  Joshua I Gold³ 

[1] Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States;Neuroscience Graduate Group, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States;Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States;

关键词: basal ganglia;    decision-making;    saccade;    motion perception;    striatum;   

DOI  :  10.7554/eLife.56694

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Our decisions often balance what we observe and what we desire. A prime candidate for implementing this complex balancing act is the basal ganglia pathway, but its roles have not yet been examined experimentally in detail. Here, we show that a major input station of the basal ganglia, the caudate nucleus, plays a causal role in integrating uncertain visual evidence and reward context to guide adaptive decision-making. In monkeys making saccadic decisions based on motion cues and asymmetric reward-choice associations, single caudate neurons encoded both sources of information. Electrical microstimulation at caudate sites during motion viewing affected the monkeys’ decisions. These microstimulation effects included coordinated changes in multiple computational components of the decision process that mimicked the monkeys’ similarly coordinated voluntary strategies for balancing visual and reward information. These results imply that the caudate nucleus plays causal roles in coordinating decision processes that balance external evidence and internal preferences.

【 授权许可】

Unknown