# Role of basal ganglia in reward-biased visual decisions

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA · 2022 · $436,279

## Abstract

Project Summary
The basal ganglia (BG) pathway has been hypothesized to contribute in several important ways to decision-
making, including accumulating evidence, controlling decision termination and commitment, transforming
abstract decisions to appropriate motor responses, and providing the machinery for evaluating and adjusting
the decision performance. However, many of these functions have been proposed in computational modeling
studies but have yet to be examined in detail in the brain, leaving important knowledge gaps that seriously
impede our ability to understand normal BG function in healthy brains and to diagnose and treat clinical
disorders that affect BG function. Our long-term goal is to conduct experiments that allow us to understand
the exact nature of the BG pathway's causal contributions to decision-making. Our original project examined
the causal roles of the caudate nucleus, an input structure in the BG, in incorporating reward and visual
evidence to make saccade decisions. Here we propose to examine the causal roles of two other BG
structures, the substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr, the output structure in the oculomotor BG) and
subthalamic nucleus (STN, a BG nucleus with high clinical importance), in decision-making. Guided by
predictions of several prominent theoretical models, we combine computational, behavioral, and
neurophysiological techniques to examine how SNr (Aim 1) and STN (Aim 2) neurons contribute to decision
deliberation and commitment given uncertain visual input alone, and in the context of flexible decisions that
must also take into account changes in reward expectation (Aim 3). Results from the proposed project will
provide the first direct experimental evidence for how these specific, clinically relevant nuclei contribute to
decision-making. These findings will be particularly useful for constraining and informing theories about the
neural implementation of decision-making in the primate brain. These findings will also serve as a foundation
for investigating the cognitive impairments associated with BG dysfunction.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10328244
- **Project number:** 5R01EY022411-07
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
- **Principal Investigator:** LONG DING
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $436,279
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2013-03-01 → 2023-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10328244

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10328244, Role of basal ganglia in reward-biased visual decisions (5R01EY022411-07). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10328244. Licensed CC0.

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