Shaping of motor responses by incentive values through the basal ganglia.

The striatum is a key neural interface for cognitive and motor information processing in which associations between reward value and visual stimulus can be used to modify motor commands. It can guide action-selection processes that occur farther downstream in the basal ganglia (BG) circuit, by encoding the reward value of an action. Here, we report on the study of simultaneously recorded neurons in the dorsal striatum (input stage of the BG) and the internal pallidum (output stage of the BG) in two monkeys performing a center-out motor task in which the visual targets were associated with different reward probabilities.