Quantitative Analysis of Functional Connectivity Between Prefrontal Cortex and Striatum in Monkey

Reward prediction is essential for learning behavior and decision-making process in the brain. It is well known that the neurons in both prefrontal cortex (PFC) and striatum are involved in encoding reward information and the interplay between the PFC and striatum plays an important role in cognitive processes. However, it remains elusive how interaction between PFC and striatum is modulated in reward conditions. To investigate this issue, the local field potentials (LFPs) were simultaneously recorded in the lateral PFC and striatum of a male monkey while performing the sequential paired-association task with the asymmetric reward scheme. The nonlinear interdependence (NLI), a measure of the generalized synchrony characterizing both the coupling strength and the coupling direction, was used to quantify the strength of bidirectional functional connectivity between the PFC and striatum. The results suggest that PFC has strong bi-directional coupling with the striatum and the interaction in beta frequency band plays an important role in regulating monkey’s behavior in reward prediction task.