Activity of striatal neurons reflects dynamic encoding and recoding of procedural memories
Barnes, Kubota, Hu, Jin and Graybiel recorded long-term activity from neurons in the sensorimotor striatum of seven rats as they learned a conditional T-maze task, then went through extinction and reacquisition. Rats turned left or right according to an auditory cue for a chocolate reward, about 40 trials a day, with recording over 24 to 63 daily sessions. Early in learning, task-related firing was spread across the whole run; with training it concentrated near the start and end, and the share of spikes inside phasic responses roughly tripled. During extinction, mid-run firing increased and the temporal shifts reversed; on reacquisition they re-formed. A neural progression index correlated with accuracy at r = 0.74 overall. The authors called the early spread neural exploration and the later concentration neural exploitation. Reading depth: full text; figures used are seven rats, about 40 trials a day, 24 to 63 sessions, roughly tripled and r = 0.74.
Barnes, Kubota, Hu, Jin and Graybiel recorded long-term activity from neurons in the sensorimotor striatum of seven rats as they learned a conditional T-maze task, then went through extinction and reacquisition. Rats turned left or right according to an auditory cue for a chocolate reward, about 40 trials a day, with recording over 24 to 63 daily sessions. Early in learning, task-related firing was spread across the whole run; with training it concentrated near the start and end, and the share of spikes inside phasic responses roughly tripled. During extinction, mid-run firing increased and the temporal shifts reversed; on reacquisition they re-formed. A neural progression index correlated with accuracy at r = 0.74 overall. The authors called the early spread neural exploration and the later concentration neural exploitation. Reading depth: full text; figures used are seven rats, about 40 trials a day, 24 to 63 sessions, roughly tripled and r = 0.74.
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Barnes, T. D., Kubota, Y., Hu, D., Jin, D. Z., & Graybiel, A. M. (2005). Activity of striatal neurons reflects dynamic encoding and recoding of procedural memories. Nature, 437(7062), 1158-1161. doi:10.1038/nature04053 https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04053