Abstract
The striatum is the main input station of the basal ganglia and is strongly associated with motor and cognitive functions. Anatomical evidence suggests that individual striatal neurons are unlikely to share their inputs from the cortex. Using a biologically realistic large-scale network model of striatum and cortico-striatal projections, we provide a functional interpretation of the special anatomical structure of these projections. Specifically, we show that weak pairwise correlation within the pool of inputs to individual striatal neurons enhances the saliency of signal representation in the striatum. By contrast, correlations among the input pools of different striatal neurons render the signal representation less distinct from background activity. We suggest that for the network architecture of the striatum, there is a preferred cortico-striatal input configuration for optimal signal representation. It is further enhanced by the low-rate asynchronous background activity in striatum, supported by the balance between feedforward and feedback inhibitions in the striatal network. Thus, an appropriate combination of rates and correlations in the striatal input sets the stage for action selection presumably implemented in the basal ganglia.
Highlights
The striatum is the main input stage of the basal ganglia and plays an important role in various cognitive and motor functions [1,2,3,4,5]
The striatum network, differs from the standard recurrent inhibitory network in that the FF and FB inhibition are clearly segregated, because the medium spiny neurons (MSNs) do not project to the fast spiking interneurons (FSI)
We show that when individual striatal neurons receive weakly correlated input from the neocortex, signal representation is enhanced
Summary
The striatum is the main input stage of the basal ganglia and plays an important role in various cognitive and motor functions [1,2,3,4,5]. The presence of recurrent inhibitory projections among the main constituent cells, the medium spiny neurons (MSNs) led to the suggestion that the Winner-Take-All (WTA) dynamics presents the main working principle of the striatum [6,7]. In most computational theories of striatum function, much emphasis is put on the connectivity of the striatal network and the individual neuron properties. Individual cortical locations give rise to multiple separate foci of innervation in the striatum, with axons from functionally related cortical regions sharing common focal striatal innervation zones [12,13]. Because task related cortical activity is modulated in both correlation and firing rate [14,15,16,17,18], individual striatal neurons are expected to receive correlated inputs
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