Correlation between procedural memory and neural activity in monkey putamen.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Single neuron activity was recorded in the monkey putamen to investigate neural characteristics of visual and motor information processing during operant bar press behavior. Of 615 neurons tested, 9.8 % (60/615) responded to sight of objects during visual and/or an enforced delay period before access to the bar. Few neurons responded at the sight of objects during the reaction time task in which the bar could be accessed for pressing immediately upon presentation of an object. Most neurons responded during the enforced delay period. The vision related neural responses depended on the nature of the objects, and the amplitude of the responses differed for different objects. The latency of the visual responses was 300-400 ms. Of the 615 neurons, 16.6 % (102) responded to arm movement such as flexion and/or extension for bar pressing. Such motor related neural activity did not correlated with the movement for each individual bar press. Motor related responses appeared rather to be affected by illumination of the task apparatus and task paradigms. These results suggest that the putamen neurons might encode visually set related conditions in appropriate conditions.