Contracting model of the basal ganglia

Abstract

It is thought that one role of the basal ganglia is to constitute the neural substrate of action selection. We propose here a modification of the action selec- tion model of the basal ganglia of (Gurney et al., 2001a,b) so as to improve its dynamical features. The dynamic behaviour of this new model is as- sessed by using the theoretical tool of contraction analysis. We simulate the model in the standard test defined in (Gurney et al., 2001b) and also showthat it performs perfect selection when presented a thou- sand successive random entries. From a biomimet- ical point of view, our model takes into account a usually neglected projection from GPe to the stria- tum, which enhances its efficiency