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Cortical integration of body posture and the vibrissae in freely exploring rats | title | Cortical integration of body posture and the vibrissae in freely exploring rats |
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| start_date | 2025/03/28 |
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| schedule | 11h30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | nc |
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| summary | Nervous systems continually integrate sensory and motor signals to coordinate behaviour, whether to enable controlled flight in an insect or a monkey plucking up a grain of food. To better understand the neural mechanisms that support movement coordination in cortex, my lab studies the neural representation of body posture in freely moving rats. We developed methods to integrate 3D motion capture with high-density neural recordings to visualize neural spiking in relation to 3D pose kinematics, which revealed that head and back kinematics are precisely encoded in posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and secondary motor cortices. More recent recent work suggested that posture and movement signals appear to be a general feature of primary sensory and motor coding, including in auditory, visual and somatosensory areas, during unrestrained behavior. The ubiquity of kinematic tuning in sensory cortices prompted us to expand our framework to include head-mounted high speed (200 FPS) tracking of the whiskers and eyes, and to ask how vibrissal deployment integrates with head kinematics and whole-body movement. This was combined with Neuropixels recordings spanning the PPC and neighboring S1 barrel fields. Ongoing work indicates that single neurons in S1 and the PPC alike conjunctively encode whisker posture and head kinematics, and that this can be further gated by locomotion. Our observations indicate that whisker deployment and head movements are fully interwoven during naturalistic behavior, which is reflected in cortical coding in both primary and associative areas. |
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| responsibles | NC |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2025/03/19 14:05 UTC |
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