Complete representation of action space and value in all dorsal striatal pathways
Moritz Weglage, Emil Wärnberg, Iakovos Lazaridis, Daniela Calvigioni, Ourania Tzortzi, Konstantinos Meletis
Abstract
The dorsal striatum plays a central role in the selection, execution, and evaluation of actions. An emerging model attributes action selection to the matrix and evaluation to the striosome compartment. Here, we use large-scale cell-type-specific calcium imaging to determine the activity of striatal projection neurons (SPNs) during motor and decision behaviors in the three major outputs of the dorsomedial striatum: Oprm1 + striosome versus D1 + direct and A2A + indirect pathway SPNs. We find that Oprm1 + SPNs show complex tunings to simple movements and value-guided actions, which are conserved across many sessions in a single task but remap between contexts. During decision making, the SPN tuning profiles form a complete representation in which sequential SPN activity jointly encodes task progress and value. We propose that the three major output pathways in the dorsomedial striatum share a similarly complete representation of the entire action space, including task- and phase-specific signals of action value and choice.