The Journal of Neurophysiology Vol. 80 No. 6 December 1998, pp. 3341-3344
Copyright ©1998 The American Physiological Society

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Influence of Predictive Information on Responses of Tonically Active Neurons in the Monkey Striatum

Paul Apicella¹, Sabrina Ravel¹, Pierangelo Sardo², and Eric Legallet¹

¹ Laboratoire de Neurobiologie Cellulaire et Fonctionnelle, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 13402 Marseille Cedex 20, France; and ² Istituto di Fisiologia Umana, Università di Palermo, 90134 Palermo, Italy

Apicella, Paul, Sabrina Ravel, Pierangelo Sardo, and Eric Legallet. Influence of predictive information on responses of tonically active neurons in the monkey striatum. J. Neurophysiol. 80: 3341-3344, 1998. We investigated how the expectation of a signal of behavioral significance influences the activity of tonically active neurons in the striatum of two monkeys performing a simple reaction time task under two conditions, an uncued condition in which the trigger stimulus occurred randomly in time and a cued condition in which the same trigger was preceded by an instruction stimulus serving as a predictive signal for the forthcoming signal eliciting an immediate behavioral reaction. Both monkeys benefited from the presence of the instruction stimulus to reduce their reaction time, suggesting an increased ability to predict the trigger onset during cued trials compared with uncued trials. A majority of neurons (199/272, 73%) showed a phasic reduction in activity after the onset of the trigger stimulus in the uncued condition, whereas only 38% responded to the same stimulus when it was preceded by the instruction. Furthermore, magnitudes of trigger responses in the uncued condition were significantly higher than in the cued condition. Fifty-seven percent of the neurons responded to the instruction stimulus, and one-half of the neurons losing their response to the trigger in the cued condition responded to the instruction stimulus. These findings suggest that responses of tonic striatal neurons to a trigger stimulus for movement were influenced by predictive information.

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