Topic: sensorimotor striatum

The brain’s ability to flexibly chain elementary movements into sequences enables rich behavior. For example, a concert pianist can play a never-before-seen sonata from the sheet music. However, to achieve the fluid and error-free performance required for a concert, she extensively practices a single piece until it is automatic. The neural circuits underlying automatic motor sequences are thought to differ from those for executing flexible ones, but the distinction is poorly understood. To address this, we trained rats to execute sequences of three lever presses in flexible sessions – where cu

We can perform a diverse range of innate and learned behaviors – from running and jumping to a swift tennis serve – with remarkable coordination and grace. While skillful execution of innate and learned behaviors is supported by sensorimotor striatum, how this region encodes behavior remains poorly understood. Studies based on learned skills suggest striatal neurons represent skills as neural sequences, with each neuron locked to a feature of the stereotyped motor output. However, whether this coding scheme generalizes to innate behaviors or emerges through learning is not known. One possibili