Thomas Boraud, Ph.D.

Laboratire Motricité-Adaptation-Cognition
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

"A Dynamic Model of Decision Making in the Cortex-Basal Ganglia Loop and its Confrontation with Experimental Data"

In a visually-guided motor task, decision-making is a distributed neural process which involves the basal ganglia (BG), which presumably act as a helper system. A consistent amount of data has suggested that the BG loop and dopamine interact during decision processes. It paves the way of several theoretical models of decision making based on different mechanisms (lateral inhibition, symmetry breaking, Bayesian decision, etc). In a recent electrophysiological study in behaving monkeys, we showed that the encoding of movement parameters by the neurons of the BG is modulated by the value of the action to perform during a center-out reward probability based free choice motor task.

It provides a mechanism by which motor program selection could be performed under dopamine control. However, the interpretation of our data is not straightforward using the current theoretical models of action selection through the basal ganglia. In this seminar, I propose to revalue the concepts on which action-selection and decision making through the cortex-basal-ganglia loop are based in order to propose a framework in which a new theoretical model could be developed to match the in vivo electrophysiological data.