Neural representation of actions in the basal ganglia

Mikael Djurfeldt

Dept. of Numerical Analysis and Computer Science, Royal Institute of Technology,
S-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden

Abstract: The basal ganglia is a set of subcortical brain nuclei which constitutes an important part of the motor system. We have applied the mutual information measure on signals from multiple neurons recorded with tetrode technique from the basal ganglia of the rat during learning of a T-maze task. In this task, the rat learnt to run left or right depending on whether a high-pitched or low-pitched tone was presented. In the presentation, it is shown how the framework of a communications channel can be applied to decoding of neural signals, and that signals in the input nucleus of the basal ganglia, the striatum, carry information about conditions such as whether the rat is turning right or left.