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This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Supplemental Material All Versions of this Article: 102/4/2142    most recent 00522.2009v1 Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Kubota, Y. Articles by Graybiel, A. M. PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Kubota, Y. Articles by Graybiel, A. M.

RESEARCH-ARTICLE

Stable Encoding of Task Structure Coexists With Flexible Coding of Task Events in Sensorimotor Striatum

¹Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts; ²Department of Psychology, St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York; ³Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts; and ⁴Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, University of California, Davis, California

Submitted 15 June 2009; accepted in final form 21 July 2009

ABSTRACT

The sensorimotor striatum, as part of the brain's habit circuitry, has been suggested to store fixed action values as a result of stimulus-response learning and has been contrasted with a more flexible system that conditionally assigns values to behaviors. The stability of neural activity in the sensorimotor striatum is thought to underlie not only normal habits but also addiction and clinical syndromes characterized by behavioral fixity. By recording in the sensorimotor striatum of mice, we asked whether neuronal activity acquired during procedural learning would be stable even if the sensory stimuli triggering the habitual behavior were altered. Contrary to expectation, both fixed and flexible activity patterns appeared. One, representing the global structure of the acquired behavior, was stable across changes in task cuing. The second, a fine-grain representation of task events, adjusted rapidly. Such dual forms of representation may be critical to allow motor and cognitive flexibility despite habitual performance.