Identifying control ensembles for decision-making within the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic circuit
During action selection, mammals exhibit a high degree of flexibility in adapting their decisions in response to environmental changes. Although the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic (CBGT) network is implicated in this adaptation, it features a synaptic architecture comprising multiple feed-forward, reciprocal, and feedback pathways, complicating efforts to elucidate the roles of specific CBGT populations in the process of evidence accumulation during decision-making. In this paper we apply a strategic sampling approach, based on Latin hypercube sampling, to explore how CBGT network properties, including subpopulation firing rates and synaptic weights, map to parameters of a normative drift diffusion model (DDM) representing algorithmic aspects of information accumulation during decision-making. Through the application of canonical correlation analysis, we find that this relationship can be characterized in terms of three low-dimensional control ensembles impacting specific qualities of the emergent decision policy: responsiveness (associated with overall activity in corticothalamic and direct pathways), pliancy (associated largely with overall activity in components of the indirect pathway of the basal ganglia), and choice (associated with differences in direct and indirect pathways across action channels). These analyses provide key mechanistic predictions about the roles of specific CBGT network elements in shifting different aspects of decision policies.