A Neurocomputational Model of Basal Ganglia-Intralaminar Nuclei Interactions: Implications for Attentional Orienting and Sense of Agency
Oliver Maith 
Erik Syniawa
Fred Hamker
The sense of agency, the feeling of control over our actions and their outcomes, is a fundamental aspect of human experience. While it is traditionally associated with higher-order cognitive processes, it would be naïve to posit that the sense of agency is based purely on top-down cortical mechanisms. Subcortically, the basal ganglia and intralaminar thalamic nuclei, in particular the centro median-parafascicular complex (CM-Pf), form intricate loops with the cortex that are crucial for attentional orienting. However, the exact computational mechanisms underlying these interactions are still unclear.
To elucidate these mechanisms, we present a neurocomputational model of a cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic network that replicates Minamimoto and Kimura’s (2002) findings on attentional orienting. As in their empirical results, our model shows that CM-Pf activity patterns are a correlate between predictable and unpredictable sensory events. The attentional shifts mediated by CM-Pf also provide a mechanistic explanation for how we can distinguish our generated (predictable) actions from the environment-induced (unpredictable) events. This would be an important mechanism in the formation of association between our actions and their outcomes.