Speaker: Dr. Steffen Wolff, University of Maryland School of Medicine
Title: Motor skill learning and execution in a distributed brain network
Host: Dr. Matt Roesch
Abstract:
One of the most remarkable feats of our brain is the ability to learn a sheer endless number of motor skills. This capacity depends on a distributed motor network, and while many components have been identified, less is known about their specific roles and interactions. We probe this network through the lens of complex, highly stereotyped and spatiotemporally precise movement patterns trained in rats. We identified the dorsolateral striatum (DLS), the main motor-related input nucleus of the basal ganglia, as a critical hub: DLS activity encodes the detailed kinematics of learned skills, and its loss disrupts their execution. Notably, while DLS requires motor cortical inputs only for learning, thalamic inputs remain necessary for execution. We further find that intra-basal ganglia feedback from the subthalamic nucleus to the striatum regulates the balance between movement variability and stereotypy during learning and execution. Finally, we interrogate the mechanisms underlying multi-skill learning, probing how the basal ganglia solve the challenge to form and store the memories for not just one, but countless skills using the same neuronal substrates. Taken together, our results show that the basal ganglia play a role in controlling complex learned behaviors beyond traditional models with distinct contributions of their various inputs.
Below is a link to a paper by Dr. Wolff that will be relevant to his talk.
https://www.science.org/doi/
The seminar schedule is available at
https://nacs.umd.edu/
