The basal ganglia (BG) are a set of interconnected subcortical nuclei, common to vertebrates, involved in action selection and reinforcement learning. The team has developed a mean-field model of the BG (Liénard & Girard, 2014, J Comput Neurosci), which has recently been translated at the individual cell level (Girard et al., 2017, SBDM). The latter model requires further developments to refine it with regards to:
* improvement of its neuro-anatomical structure,
* the systematic evaluation of its selection capabilities,
* its behavior in Parkinsonian conditions,
* its behavior in catatonic conditions.
This work is made in collaboration with Kenji Doya (OIST, Japan).