Cortico-striatal action control inherent of opponent cognitive-motivational styles

Turning on cue or stopping at a red light requires attending to such cues to select action sequences, or suppress action, in accordance with learned cue-associated action rules. Cortico-striatal projections are an essential part of the brain’s attention-motor interface. Glutamate-sensing microelectrode arrays were used to measure glutamate transients in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) of male and female rats walking a treadmill and executing cued turns and stops. Prelimbic-DMS projections were chemogenetically inhibited to determine their behavioral necessity and the cortico-striatal origin of cue-evoked glutamate transients. Furthermore, we investigated rats exhibiting preferably goal-directed (goal trackers, GTs) versus cue-driven attention (sign trackers, STs), to determine the impact of such cognitive-motivational biases on cortico-striatal control. GTs executed more cued turns and initiated such turns more slowly than STs. During turns, but not missed turns or cued stops, cue-evoked..., Subjects and Behavioral Training: Male and female rats were trained on the Cue-Triggered Turning Task (CTTT) to assess cued turn and stop performance. Rats were classified as goal trackers (GTs) or sign trackers (STs) via Pavlovian Conditioned Approach (PCA) screening.The number of cued turns, missed turns, cued stops, and false turns were extracted from offline scoring of CTTT session videos. For the analysis of baseline CTTT performance, and because rats generated a variable number of cued turns during the 4 sessions used for this analysis, individual turn onset and completion times were averaged across the test sessions. 
Chemogenetic Manipulation: Rats underwent intracranial infusions of Cre-dependent Designer Receptor Exclusively Activated by Designer Drug (DREADD) and retrogradely transported Cre-expressing plasmids to inhibit fronto-cortical projections to the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) before CTTT acquisition. A second surgery was performed for the implantation of microelec..., , # Cortico-striatal action control inherent of opponent cognitive-motivational styles

[https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.100988.2](https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.100988.2)

## Dataset Overview:

This dataset contains the data used to generate figures in Avila and Sarter (2024), testing the hypothesis that variations in the individual capacity for cortico-striatal processing of movement cues contribute to the expression of opponent cognitive-motivational styles: goal-directed (goal-trackers, GTs) versus stimulus-driven (sign-trackers, STs). Four cohorts of female and male rats were screened over 19 months and classified as GTs, STs, or intermediates (not assessed in these experiments). A subset of GTs and STs received intracranial infusions of a Cre-dependent DREADD into the frontal cortex and a retrogradely transported Cre-expressing plasmid into the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) to inhibit fronto-cortical projections to the DMS. These rats were then trained and tested on a treadmill task requi...