ePoster

Brain-wide neural dynamics accompanying fast goal-directed sensorimotor learning

Axel Bisi, Anthony Renard, Robin Dard, Sylvain Crochet, Carl Petersen
COSYNE 2025(2025)
Montreal, Canada

Conference

COSYNE 2025

Montreal, Canada

Resources

Authors & Affiliations

Axel Bisi, Anthony Renard, Robin Dard, Sylvain Crochet, Carl Petersen

Abstract

Animals use previous knowledge to flexibly guide behaviour, quickly learning to respond appropriately to novel stimuli, for example using rewards as a teaching signal. Task-relevant information and behavioural states are represented globally in the brain, which suggests distributed representations during sensorimotor learning. However, these brain-wide representations have been measured in distinct expert or naive animals with ”stationary” representations. It remains unclear how de novo learning of a sensorimotor transformation involves distributed, parallel activity throughout the brain. To address this, we developed a behavioral paradigm that allows us to probe rapid reward-based sensorimotor learning in mice, overcoming the limitations of longitudinal recordings. Mice are first pretrained on an auditory detection task in which they must lick for a reward after an auditory stimulus. Once expert in this task, these mice are transferred to a whisker-based detection task, where they must also learn to lick for a reward after a novel whisker stimulus, while continuing to perform the auditory task. Mice were able to acquire the novel whisker-reward association in fast timescales, progressing from novice to high-performance levels within a single session. Furthermore, this learning manifested after only a few trials and was contingent upon the reward, as the association did not develop in a cohort of mice that did not receive a reward following whisker stimulation. During this single-session learning, we performed Neuropixels recordings using up to 4 probes simultaneously, revealing widespread task-related neural activity across the brain. We observed that whisker representations emerged in an area-specific manner and dependent on the stimulus-reward contingencies. These results indicate that reward-based sensorimotor learning recruits and modulates brain-wide representations during fast timescale learning.

Unique ID: cosyne-25/brain-wide-neural-dynamics-accompanying-b0d635e1