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Neuronal ensemble bursting in the basal forebrain encodes salience irrespective of valence.

ABSTRACT: Both reward- and punishment-related stimuli are motivationally salient and attract the attention of animals. However, it remains unclear how motivational salience is processed in the brain. Here, we show that both reward- and punishment-predicting stimuli elicited robust bursting of many noncholinergic basal forebrain (BF) neurons in behaving rats. The same BF neurons also responded with similar bursting to primary reinforcement of both valences. Reinforcement responses were modulated by expectation, with surprising reinforcement eliciting stronger BF bursting. We further demonstrate that BF burst firing predicted successful detection of near-threshold stimuli. Together, our results point to the existence of a salience-encoding system independent of stimulus valence. We propose that the encoding of motivational salience by ensemble bursting of noncholinergic BF neurons may improve behavioral performance by affecting the activity of widespread cortical circuits and therefore represents a novel candidate mechanism for top-down attention.

SUBMITTER: Lin SC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2697387 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Neuronal ensemble bursting in the basal forebrain encodes salience irrespective of valence.

Lin Shih-Chieh SC Nicolelis Miguel A L MA

Neuron 20080701 1

Both reward- and punishment-related stimuli are motivationally salient and attract the attention of animals. However, it remains unclear how motivational salience is processed in the brain. Here, we show that both reward- and punishment-predicting stimuli elicited robust bursting of many noncholinergic basal forebrain (BF) neurons in behaving rats. The same BF neurons also responded with similar bursting to primary reinforcement of both valences. Reinforcement responses were modulated by expecta ...[more]

PMID: 18614035

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Project description:The survival of animals depends critically on prioritizing responses to motivationally salient stimuli. While it is generally believed that motivational salience increases decision speed, the quantitative relationship between motivational salience and decision speed, measured by reaction time (RT), remains unclear. Here we show that the neural correlate of motivational salience in the basal forebrain (BF), defined independently of RT, is coupled with faster and also more precise decision speed. In rats performing a reward-biased simple RT task, motivational salience was encoded by BF bursting response that occurred before RT. We found that faster RTs were tightly coupled with stronger BF motivational salience signals. Furthermore, the fraction of RT variability reflecting the contribution of intrinsic noise in the decision-making process was actively suppressed in faster RT distributions with stronger BF motivational salience signals. Artificially augmenting the BF motivational salience signal via electrical stimulation led to faster and more precise RTs and supports a causal relationship. Together, these results not only describe for the first time, to our knowledge, the quantitative relationship between motivational salience and faster decision speed, they also reveal the quantitative coupling relationship between motivational salience and more precise RT. Our results further establish the existence of an early and previously unrecognized step in the decision-making process that determines both the RT speed and variability of the entire decision-making process and suggest that this novel decision step is dictated largely by the BF motivational salience signal. Finally, our study raises the hypothesis that the dysregulation of decision speed in conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, and cognitive aging may result from the functional impairment of the motivational salience signal encoded by the poorly understood noncholinergic BF neurons.

Dataset Information

Neuronal ensemble bursting in the basal forebrain encodes salience irrespective of valence.

Publications

Neuronal ensemble bursting in the basal forebrain encodes salience irrespective of valence.

Similar Datasets

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