Abstract
Evolutionary development of vision has provided us with the capacity to detect moving objects. Concordant shifts of visual features suggest movements of the observer, whereas discordant changes are more likely to be indicating independently moving objects, such as predators or prey. Such distinction helps us to focus attention, adapt our behavior, and adjust our motor patterns to meet behavioral challenges. However, the neural basis of distinguishing self-induced and self-independent visual motions is not clarified in unrestrained animals yet. In this study, we investigated the presence and origin of motion-related visual information in the striatum of rats, a hub of action selection and procedural memory. We found that while almost half of the neurons in the dorsomedial striatum are sensitive to visual motion congruent with locomotion (and that many of them also code for spatial location), only a small subset of them are composed of fast-firing interneurons that could also perceive self-independent visual stimuli. These latter cells receive their visual input at least partially from the secondary visual cortex (V2). This differential visual sensitivity may be an important support in adjusting behavior to salient environmental events. It emphasizes the importance of investigating visual motion perception in unrestrained animals.
Highlights
Besides the well-known motor functions of the basal ganglia [1], there is massive evidence for its role in higher-order integrative functions
To previous results obtained in mice and rats [7,23], we found that neurons of the secondary visual cortex (V2, and the most rostral part of the primary visual cortex (V1)) send axonal projections to the injected area of the caudate putamen (CPu) (Fig 1B)
We found that axons originating from V2 neurons colocalized with the cFos+ neurons
Summary
Besides the well-known motor functions of the basal ganglia [1], there is massive evidence for its role in higher-order integrative functions. While the ventral part of the caudate putamen (CPu) is mainly associated with reward and motivation-related processes (e.g., reinforcement [2]), the dorsal part is involved in executive functions based on both stimulus response learning [3] and procedural memory [4,5,6] Neurons of this dorsal sensorimotor striatum can perceive elementary visual cues representing luminance changes [7,8] and visual motion [9,10,11,12] and integrate them with other modalities [13,14] to serve their function in multiple potential ways. This latter process may be important for survival by facilitating appropriate action selection through perceptual decisionmaking [19]
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