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Poster A in Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 4, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Bottom-up Modeling of Striatum and its Brain Circuit Interactions

Romina Ahmadi¹, Rockford Dutta¹, Anand Pathank¹, Evan G Antzoulatos², Earl K Miller³, Richard Granger¹; ¹Dartmouth College, ²University of California, Davis, ³Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Presenter: Romina Ahmadi

The basal ganglia is involved in a variety of cognitive functions such as action selection, goal-directed behavior, and reward-based decision-making. However, most computational models of the cortico-basal ganglia circuits exclude major characteristics such as detailed physiological interactions among cells, and inclusion of multiple distinct cell types (including GABAergic fast spiking neurons, cholinergic interneurons, and more). Given the extensive role of these interneurons in reward-based learning, it is of great interest to study their properties at the circuit level. Here we present a bottom-up biologically-derived spiking model of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit incorporating D1 and D2 medium spiny neurons as well as fast-spiking and cholinergic interneurons, and evaluate it on a dot-distortion category-learning task matched to macaque electrophysiology and rodent interneuron recordings. The model reproduces key empirical signatures including task-dependent firing patterns and cell-type-specific interactions across striatal and prefrontal cortical populations. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating multiple populations of existing cell types into computational models of brain circuitry. The model offers new insights into the circuit-level mechanisms of reward-based decision-making.

Topic Area: Methods, Tools, Theory & Neural Coding