Neural activity in rat nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum during probabilistic free-choice decision-making (Ito & Doya 2009)

This Dandiset contains NWB files with behavioral and extracellular electrophysiological recordings from six male Long-Evans rats performing a conditional free-choice task with probabilistic rewards. In the task, rats maintained a center nose-poke during an auditory cue and then chose left or right nose-pokes; reward probabilities for each action switched across blocks according to four (left, right) schedules: (90,50), (50,90), (50,10), and (10,50) percent. Single-unit activity was recorded using movable microwire bundles implanted in the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum across 70 sessions (≈60,000 trials in total). For each trial, the dataset includes spike times, trial type (choice vs no-choice), selected action, reward outcome, and key event timestamps (tones, nose-pokes, pellet retrieval), all aligned within session time. These data were originally collected for Ito & Doya, J Neurosci 2009 (DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6157-08.2009), which compared reinforcement-learning models of behavior and analyzed how action values, trial type, and reward outcome are represented in ventral basal ganglia. This dataset is suitable for re-analysis of decision-making strategies, model-based neural coding, and computational studies of cortico-basal ganglia circuits.