Active Brain & Nervous System

Neural Mechanisms of Cognitive Control in Cortico-Basal Ganglia Circuits

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation University College London
Funding £4.0M
Period Nov 2025 — Nov 2033

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Every time you look left before crossing the street in the UK, or right in the US, your frontal cortex is telling your basal ganglia to override a habitual action pattern. This project will map the neural circuits that make that kind of flexible control possible. Current theories suggest the frontal cortex reuses the same brain circuits that handle basic movement choices—like deciding whether to reach for a cup or step over a puddle—but scaled up for abstract rules and complex plans. The problem is that direct evidence for how this works at the circuit level has been missing. The researchers have identified a candidate control mechanism in mice and will now trace exactly how it operates, how learning shapes it, and whether the same wiring logic can handle multiple layers of rules at once. This is fundamental science. It will not produce a drug or a device next year. But understanding how the brain repurposes simple circuit motifs to govern increasingly complex behaviour could eventually inform treatments for conditions where cognitive control breaks down—such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, or Parkinson’s disease—where the cortico-basal ganglia network is known to malfunction.

View original technical description
How do we adapt our actions to different situations–from looking left or right at road-crossings in different countries to following complex rules that structure our daily routines? Such cognitive control depends on frontal cortex, but little is known of the circuit mechanisms through which it acts. Compelling theories suggest that frontal cortex flexibly controls behaviour by working through basal ganglia, repurposing similar circuit mechanisms as for basic action selection. These theories are based on the recursive architecture of cortico-basal ganglia loops, and are consistent with correlative studies in primates–yet direct evidence and mechanistic insight are lacking. Our preliminary findings identify such a control mechanism in the cortex-basal ganglia network of mice, and therefore afford the opportunity to resolve its circuit implementation. We will identify (i) circuit principles that implement cognitive control in the frontal cortex-basal ganglia network; (ii) how these circuits are shaped by learning to support cognitive control; and (iii) whether these principles generalise to higher levels of abstraction to enable hierarchical cognitive control. This will provide circuit-level understanding of cognitive control, and potentially reveal a common generalisable circuit principle—used recursively to govern increasingly complex behaviors.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Tom Mrsic-Flogel (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

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Original classification

Discovery Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.