The striatum is a subcortical structure involved in a wide range of diseases (Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder) but its function is still highly debated. As someone once put it: « there sometimes seem to be as many hypotheses as there are groups working on the subject »[1]. This lack of knowledge hindered the understanding and treatment of diseases. In our team, we believe that a prerequisite for clarifying the function of the striatum is the use of naturalistic tasks and the investigation of how animals adapt their behavior (decision and movement kinematics) when constraints relevant to the function under investigation are experimentally manipulated. In the past years we’ve developed foraging tasks for freely behaving rodents (rats and mice), started understanding the logic of adaptive decisions (exploit/explore decisions, navigation choice) and movements (movement speed, direction, variability), and delineated complementary motivational functions of the dorsal and ventral striatum that affect specific aspects of foraging [2,3].
We are proposing M1 and M2 internships in which we continue this effort, including recording and perturbing neural circuits and neuromodulators using electrophysiology, fiber photometry, closed-loop optogenetics and behavior, along with computational modeling.
There are many questions to be answered at different levels, allowing us to tailor different kinds of internships (behavioral investigation combined with data analysis and modelling, or combined with neurophysiological recording/perturbation). Right now we are specifically interested in testing whether the two main types of projection neurons of the striatum (D1 and D2) provide opponent modulation of willingness to exert effort in the dorsal striatum and urgency to obtain reward in the ventral striatum We also have ongoing projects on how explore-exploit decisions are sensitive to motivational constraints and how they are influenced by body posture and movement kinematics (embodied strategies). ANR funding for following up M2 with a PhD is already secured.
1. Turner, R.S., and Desmurget, M. (2010). Basal ganglia contributions to motor control: a vigorous tutor. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 20, 704–716. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2010.08.022.
2. Schaffhauser, M., Orjollet-Lacomme, T., Amroune, K., Morvan, T., Fortoul, A., Lechelon, M., and Robbe, D. (2026). The Tower Foraging Park: A paradigm for studying cognitive and motor processes underlying behavioral flexibility in freely moving mice. iScience, 116498. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.116498.
3. Morvan, T., Timmel, Z., Eloy, C., and Robbe, D. (2026). Complementary contributions of dorsal and ventral striatum to cost-benefit vigor adaptations. Preprint at bioRxiv, https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.05.31.596850 https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.05.31.596850.
4. Robbe, D., and Safaie, M. (2023). Hot times for the dorsal striatum. Nat. Neurosci. 26, 1320–1321.
5. Jurado-Parras, M.-T., Safaie, M., Sarno, S., Louis, J., Karoutchi, C., Berret, B., and Robbe, D. (2020). The Dorsal Striatum Energizes Motor Routines. Curr. Biol. 30, 4362-4372.e6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.08.049.
6. Rueda-Orozco, P.E., and Robbe, D. (2015). The striatum multiplexes contextual and kinematic information to constrain motor habits execution. Nat. Neurosci. 18, 453–460. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3924.
7. Robbe, D. (2023). Lost in time: Relocating the perception of duration outside the brain. Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 153, 105312. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105312.
