The motor, cognitive, affective, and autonomic functions of the basal ganglia

The basal ganglia are involved in several processes, ranging from motor to cognitive ones. This chapter briefly discusses the role of the basal ganglia in motor (including reaching, handwriting, precision grip, gait, saccade generation, and speech), cognitive (action selection, decision making, attention, working memory, sequence learning, and sleep regulation), mood/emotion (negative and positive affect), and autonomic (gastrointestinal and cardiovascular) processes. The chapter summarizes key experimental studies explaining the role of the basal ganglia in all of these motor, cognitive, and affective processes. Accordingly, this chapter provides a background on the function of the basal ganglia, which is key information that guides the reader to understand the following computational modeling efforts to understand the role of the basal ganglia in several functional processes.