The basal ganglia (BG) represent a critical center of the nervous system for sensorial discrimination. Although it is known that Huntington’s disease (HD) affects this brain area, it still remains unclear how HD patients achieve paradoxical improvement in sensorial discrimination tasks. This paper presents a computational model of the BG including the main nuclei and the typical firing properties of their neurons. The BG model has been embedded within an auditory signal detection task. We have emulated the effect that the altered levels of dopamine and the degree of HD affectation have in information processing at different layers of the BG, and how these aspects shape transient and steady states differently throughout the selection task. By extracting the independent components of the BG activity at different populations, it is evidenced that early and medium stages of HD affectation may enhance transient activity in the striatum and the substantia nigra pars reticulata. These results represent a possible explanation for the paradoxical improvement that HD patients present in discrimination task performance. Thus, this paper provides a novel understanding on how the fast dynamics of the BG network at different layers interact and enable transient states to emerge throughout the successive neuron populations.

中文翻译：

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一个基底神经节计算模型来解释亨廷顿病存在的矛盾感觉改善

基底神经节 (BG) 代表了神经系统进行感觉辨别的关键中心。尽管已知亨廷顿病 (HD) 会影响这一大脑区域，但仍不清楚 HD 患者如何在感觉辨别任务中实现矛盾的改善。本文提出了 BG 的计算模型，包括主核及其神经元的典型放电特性。BG 模型已嵌入到听觉信号检测任务中。我们已经模拟了多巴胺水平的改变和 HD 做作程度对 BG 不同层信息处理的影响，以及这些方面如何在整个选择任务中以不同的方式塑造瞬态和稳态。通过提取不同人群 BG 活动的独立成分，有证据表明，HD 影响的早期和中期可能会增强纹状体和黑质网状部的瞬时活动。这些结果代表了 HD 患者在辨别任务表现中出现的矛盾改善的可能解释。因此，本文对不同层的 BG 网络的快速动态如何相互作用以及如何使瞬态在整个连续的神经元群中出现提供了新的理解。