We find that EPSCs elicited with electrical stimulation show short term facilitation in a majority of cells. We address the question of how this facilitation may contribute to the effect of bursts of STN activity on GP activity in the Parkinsonian state. A great deal of effort has focused on developing a detailed understanding of the circuitry and function of the basal ganglia in hopes of developing novel therapeutic approaches for the treatment of movement disorders. We have performed a series of studies that reveal that mGluRs play a number of important roles at multiple sites in the basal ganglia circuit. These studies suggest that members of this receptor family could serve as targets for novel therapeutic agents.
Songbirds use auditory feedback to guide learning of a song previously memorized from another bird.
Some anatomical evidence supports the idea that the learning pathway is homologous to the cortico-basal ganglia loop in mammals. Because such homology would be valuable for addressing the mechanisms of song learning, and could shed light on more general issues of basal ganglia function, we are interested in testing this possibility. In my talk I will provide an overview of avian song learning, present our anatomical and electrophysiological evidence of similarity between the learning pathway and the basal ganglia, raise some problems with this idea, and discuss how we might use this information to understand the acquisition and generation of a complex learned behavior. Finally, I will suggest that understanding the role of the anterior forebrain pathway in song learning could have direct implications for understanding basal ganglia function and dysfunction in mammals. Long-term changes in the efficacy of excitatory synaptic transmission have been proposed as possible cellular substrates underlying learning and memory.