Data from: 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
glutamate concentrations were higher in GTs than in STs. In STs, turn
cue-locked glutamate concentrations frequently peaked twice or three
times, contrasting with predominately single peaks in GTs. In GTs, but not
STs, inhibition of prelimbic-DMS projections attenuated turn rates and
turn cue-evoked glutamate concentrations and increased the number of turn
cue-locked glutamate peaks. These findings indicate that turn cue-evoked
glutamate release in GTs is tightly controlled by cortico-striatal
neuronal activity. In contrast, in STs, glutamate release from DMS
glutamatergic terminals may be regulated by other striatal circuitry,
preferably mediating cued suppression of action and reward tracking. As
cortico-striatal dysfunction has been hypothesized to contribute to a wide
range of disorders, including complex movement control deficits in
Parkinson’s disease and compulsive drug taking, the demonstration of
phenotypic contrasts in cortico-striatal control implies the presence of
individual vulnerabilities for such disorders.