A02Organization of Cortico-Basal Ganglia and Cortico-Cerebellar Loop Circuits that Arise from the Prefrontal Cortex

　The prefrontal cortex is well-developed in primates and exerts a variety of cognitive control on behaviors (e.g. working memory, selective attention, problem solving, and decision making). Recent success of artificial intelligence program AlphaGo in combining supervised learning and reinforcement learning indicates that these higher-order functions in the prefrontal cortex are supported by communication between the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia or cerebellum. Thus, to know the neural mechanism of these functions, revealing the anatomical architecture of cortico-basal ganglia and cortico-cerebellar loop circuits is critical. In this project, we aim to elucidate the organization of these loop circuits that arise from the prefrontal cortex, with respect to their parallel processing and information funneling capabilities, by developing and applying multicolored retrograde transneuronal tracing techniques based on viral vectors we have recently developed.