Experience-related enhancements in striatal temporal encoding

Temporal control of action is key for a broad range of behaviors and is disrupted in human diseases such as Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia. A brain structure that is critical for temporal control is the dorsal striatum. Experience and learning can influence dorsal striatal neuronal activity, but it is unknown how these neurons change with experience in contexts which require precise temporal control of movement. We investigated this question by recording from medium spiny neurons (MSNs) via dorsal striatal microelectrode arrays in mice as they gained experience controlling their actions in time. We leveraged an interval timing task optimized for mice which required them to "switch" response ports after enough time had passed without receiving a reward. We report three main results. First, we found that time-related ramping activity and response-related activity increased with task experience. Second, temporal decoding by MSN ensembles improved with experience and was predominantly driven by time-related ramping activity. Finally, we found that a subset of MSNs had differential modulation on error trials. These findings enhance our understanding of dorsal striatal temporal processing by demonstrating how MSN ensembles can evolve with experience. Our results can be linked to temporal habituation and illuminate striatal flexibility during interval timing, which may be relevant for human disease.