The thalamus engages in various functions including sensory processing, attention, decision
making and memory. Classically, this diversity of function has been attributed to the nuclear …

The ability to establish behaviorally what psychological capacity an animal is deploying—to
discern accurately what an animal is doing—is key to functional analyses of the brain. Our …

Striatal dopamine and acetylcholine are essential for the selection and reinforcement of
motor actions and decision-making. In vitro studies have revealed an intrastriatal circuit in …

The cortico–basal ganglia–thalamo–cortical loop is one of the fundamental network motifs in
the brain. Revealing its structural and functional organization is critical to understanding …

Diverse types of glutamatergic pyramidal neurons mediate the myriad processing streams
and output channels of the cerebral cortex,, yet all derive from neural progenitors of the …

Significant evidence supports the view that dopamine shapes learning by encoding reward
prediction errors. However, it is unknown whether striatal targets receive tailored dopamine …

In the basal ganglia (BG), anatomically segregated and topographically organized
feedforward circuits are thought to modulate multiple behaviors in parallel. Although …

Although bradykinesia, tremor and rigidity are the hallmark motor defects in patients with
Parkinson's disease (PD), patients also experience motor learning impairments and non …

The acquisition and execution of motor skills are mediated by a distributed motor network,
spanning cortical and subcortical brain areas. The sensorimotor striatum is an important cog …

Basal ganglia play a central role in regulating behavior, but the organization of their outputs
to other brain areas is incompletely understood. We investigate the largest output nucleus …