Reward-Modulated Functional Connectivity Between Prefrontal Cortex and Striatum

Abstract

Functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and striatum is thought to be critical in cognitive processing. Local field potentials (LFPs) were simultaneously recorded in the lateral PFC and striatum while the monkey was performing a reward predicting task. The functional connectivity was calculated between the PFC and striatum by examining synchrony between oscillations of their LFPs. We found that during the delay period after the cue stimulus presentation, function connectivity was significantly higher in small than large reward trials in beta and low gamma bands, and was significantly lower in high gamma band. We did not observe reward-modulated functional connectivity either in the three bands during the cue stimulus presentation period. Our results were in line with the idea that beta frequency played an important role in cognitive operations and the activity in gamma band was involved in the stimulus selection and behavior performance.