Pallidal neuromodulation of the explore/exploit trade-off in decision-making.

Every decision that we make involves a conflict between exploiting our current knowledge of an action's value or exploring alternative courses of action that might lead to a better, or worse outcome. The sub-cortical nuclei that make up the basal ganglia have been proposed as a neural circuit that may contribute to resolving this explore-exploit 'dilemma'. To test this hypothesis, we examined the effects of neuromodulating the basal ganglia's output nucleus, the globus pallidus interna, in patients who had undergone deep brain stimulation (DBS) for isolated dystonia.

CLOVER-DBS: Algorithm-Guided Deep Brain Stimulation-Programming Based on External Sensor Feedback Evaluated in a Prospective, Randomized, Crossover, Double-Blind, Two-Center Study.

Background: Recent technological advances in deep brain stimulation (DBS) (e.g., directional leads, multiple independent current sources) lead to increasing DBS-optimization burden.