MULTI-REGION POPULATION DYNAMICS DURING CONTEXT-DEPENDENT SENSORY-MOTOR BEHAVIOR

Flexible behavior requires routing sensory information according to behavioral context, but how context-dependent gating transforms across the cortical hierarchy remains unclear. We investigated neuronal mechanisms underlying context-dependent sensory-motor transformation using a recently-developed context-dependent whisker-detection task. Mice learned to lick for reward after whisker stimulation in one context while withholding responses in another, with auditory background sounds signaling context. Widefield calcium imaging and optogenetic inactivation revealed context-dependent contributions of diverse cortical regions, with a prominent causal role for retrosplenial cortex (Bech, Dard, Lebert et al., eLife 2026).
To investigate underlying neuronal activity with single-cell resolution and higher temporal precision, we performed simultaneous multi-region Neuropixels recordings from primary whisker somatosensory cortex (wS1), whisker motor cortex (wM1/M2), anterior lateral motor cortex (ALM), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), retrosplenial cortex (RSC), hippocampus, and thalamus (n=5 mice). Preliminary analyses decoding stimulus presence revealed graded context-dependent modulation across regions: wS1 showed modest modulation with whisker responses remaining distinguishable from catch across contexts, while RSC and thalamus showed substantially stronger suppression where whisker responses in non-rewarded contexts became less distinguishable from catch trials. Previous work demonstrated that RSC is necessary for behavioral suppression in non-rewarded contexts (Bech, Dard, Lebert et al., eLife 2026). Ongoing analyses are examining population level mechanisms within RSC and other regions, including whether functionally distinct subpopulations gate sensory information differentially. Understanding these mechanisms will reveal how cortical networks enable flexible, context-dependent routing of sensory information for adaptive behavior.