Basal ganglia output guides decision-making by state destabilization

In adult zebrafish, pallidal output activity destabilizes ongoing Dc activity states, enabling goal-directed Go/No-go decisions toward the behavioral state with minimum pallidal output.

• Why it matters: Learned behavior requires switching between current and learned activity states, but how basal ganglia output triggers these transitions during goal-directed tasks is unclear.
• What they did: After zebrafish learned a virtual-reality Go/No-go task, the striatal indirect pathway encoded negative cue values and missing sensory feedback, which pallidal output integrated and broadcast to Dc; optogenetics plus mathematical modeling tested the destabilization mechanism.
• The result: The integrated pallidal signal uniformly destabilized Dc activity states in the model and matched optogenetic findings, supporting a mechanism for guiding state transitions across barriers between behavioral-state attractors.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.