Striatal Acetylcholine and Dopamine Interactions Produce Situation-appropriate Action Selection

Individuals often learn how to perform new actions for particular outcomes against a complex background of existing action-outcome associations. As such, this new knowledge can interfere or even compete with existing knowledge, such that individuals must use internal and external cues to determine which action is appropriate to the current situation. The question thus remains as to how this problem is solved at a neural level. Research over the last decade or so has begun to determine how the brain achieves situation-appropriate action selection. Several converging lines of evidence suggest that it is achieved through the complex interactions of acetylcholine and dopamine within the striatum in a manner that relies on glutamatergic inputs from the cortex and thalamus. Here we briefly review this evidence, then relate it to several very recent findings to provide new, speculative insights regarding the precise nature of striatal acetylcholine/dopamine interaction dynamics and their relation to situation-appropriate action selection.