Citation

Joshua M, Adler A, Bergman H. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 2009; 19(6): 615-620.

Affiliation

Department of Medical Neurobiology, The Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem 91120, Israel; The Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.conb.2009.10.001

PMID

19896833

Abstract

The basal ganglia are known to control behavior using reward information; however, recent experiments have revealed that the basal ganglia contribute to the processing of salient non-rewarding events as well. Here, we suggest that the temporal dynamics of the response of dopaminergic neurons (DANs) enable the basal ganglia to have a dual role. The fast DAN response to salient events is mediated thorough the brainstem-basal ganglia loop. Forebrain loops enable the second phase of the dopaminergic responses that require highly processed information. The convergent encoding of fast/salient and slow/detailed information suggests that the basal ganglia control the trade-off between fast and immediate responses to environmental events and slow responses that are only executed after substantial environmental information has been gathered.

Language: en