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1 Deptartment of Developmental Physiology, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Okazaki, Aichi, Japan
2 Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland, United States
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: taikeda-ns{at}umin.ac.jp.
Expectation of reward is crucial for goal-directed behavior of animals. However, little is known about how reward information is used in the brain at the time of action. We investigated this question by recording from single neurons in the macaque superior colliculus (SC) while the animal was performing a memory-guided saccade task with an asymmetrical reward schedule. The SC is an ideal structure to ask this question because it receives inputs from many brain areas including the prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia where reward information is thought to be encoded and sends motor commands to the brainstem saccade generators. We found two groups of SC neurons that encoded reward information in the pre-saccadic period: positive reward-coding neurons that showed higher activity when reward was expected and negative reward-coding neurons that showed higher activity when reward was not expected. The positive reward-coding usually started even before a cue for target position was presented, whereas the negative reward-coding was largely restricted to the pre-saccadic period. The two kinds of reward-coding may be useful for the animal to select an appropriate behavior in a complex environment.
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