Feedforward inhibition

The posterior most region of the striatum receives dense innervation from sensory brain regions and has been demonstrated to play a role in behaviors that require sensorimotor integration including discrimination, avoidance and defense​ responses. The output neurons of the striatum, the D1 and D2 striatal projection neurons (SPNs) that make up the direct and indirect pathways, respectively, are thought to play differential roles in these behavioral responses, although it remains unclear if or how these neurons display differential responsivity to sensory stimuli. Here, we use whole cell membra

…interneurons (FSI) which constitute feedforward inhibition (FFI). Therefore, striatal neurons receive a high degree of shared FFI, which makes the striatum a unique network in the brain. Here we ask, what role such high shared FFI may play in striatal function besides inducing synchrony. We found that with highly shared connectivity FSIs increase the trial-by-trial variability of striatal responses. Moreover, when the striatum is driven by correlated inputs, FSIs decorrelate the response

Predicting the future state of the environment is a crucial task for neural systems, which must compensate for significant delays in both sensation and action. Despite this fundamental importance, we lack a rigorous theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanisms of prediction. While several phenomenological and biophysical mechanisms have been proposed to model experimental data, they are typically nonlinear and difficult to analyze. On the other hand, prediction has been exhaustively studied in classical linear filtering theory, but this engineering approach does not explicitly addres

Decisions about where to move the eyes depend on neurons in frontal eye field (FEF). Movement neurons in FEF accumulate salience evidence derived from FEF visual neurons to select the location of a saccade target among distractors. How visual neurons achieve this salience representation is unknown. We present a neuro-computational model of target selection called Salience by Competitive and Recurrent Interactions (SCRI), based on the competitive interaction model of attentional selection and decision-making (Smith & Sewell, 2013). SCRI selects targets by synthesizing localization and identific