Talk: Motor skill learning and execution in a distributed brain network

Описание: Speaker: Steffen Wolff, Harvard University (grid.38142.3c)
Title: Motor skill learning and execution in a distributed brain network
Emcee: Adam Steel
Backend host: Sophia Batchelor
Details: https://neuromatch.io/abstract?submis...
Paper link 1: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.11...
Paper link 2: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.11...
Twitter:   / sbe_wolff  
Presented during Neuromatch Conference 3.0, Oct 26-30, 2020.

Summary: The remarkable capacity of the brain to acquire and execute motor skills depends on a distributed motor network. While many components have been identified, less is known about their specific roles and interactions during skill learning and execution. Here we probe this network through the lens of complex, spatiotemporally precise motor sequences we train in rats. We focus on the basal ganglia and the contributions made by their main inputs, from motor cortex and thalamus, respectively. Using electrophysiological recordings, we find that the dorsolateral striatum (DLS), the main motor-related input nucleus of the basal ganglia, encodes the detailed kinematic structure of the learned motor sequences. We further show that a loss of the DLS renders animals unable to execute the learned idiosyncratic motor patterns, causing them to revert to simple species-typical behaviors. In addition, we find that not only the DLS, but also its motor cortical inputs are necessary for learning the skills we train. This very same pathway, however, becomes dispensable after the behaviors are acquired. In line with this, the loss of motor cortical inputs leaves the DLS activity encoding the kinematic structure of the behavior largely unaffected. In contrast, thalamic inputs to the DLS remain crucial for the generation of the learned skills and loss of these inputs disrupts performance akin to DLS lesions, causing a reversion to the same species-typical behavior. Together, our results suggest that the basal ganglia can play a role in the control of complex learned behaviors which goes beyond traditional models of basal ganglia function. They further suggest that motor cortex ‘tutors’ sub-cortical motor circuits during learning, potentially by guiding plasticity at thalamostriatal synapses. Such adaptive reprogramming of lower-level motor circuits may broaden their flexibility and allow them to store and generate complex learned motor skills.