Topic: behavioral state

Changes in an animal’s behavior and internal state are accompanied by widespread changes in activity across its brain. However, how neurons across the brain encode behavior and how this is impacted by state is poorly understood. We recorded brain-wide activity and the diverse motor programs of freely-moving C. elegans and built probabilistic models that explain how each neuron encodes quantitative features of the animal’s behavior. By determining the identities of the recorded neurons, we created, for the first time, an atlas of how the defined neuron classes in the C. elegans connectome encod

Healthy cerebral cortex function requires complex neuronal population activity with a diverse repertoire of timescales, from fleeting response to sensory input ($\sim$10-100 ms), to execution of complex body movements ($\sim 100-1000 ms$), to even longer timescales of working memory ($\sim 1-10 s$). How does cortex generate such a broad range of timescales? How is the timescale repertoire tuned in response to shifting behavioral demands? One potential explanation is that cortex operates close to criticality, i.e., close to a boundary between two different dynamical regimes. At criticality, flu

While sensory coding is traditionally thought of as a process independent of behavioral state, modern studies showcase potent modulatory effects of movement on sensory neurons. Intriguingly, these effects are not uniform and can differ between species. In insects and rodents, visual responses increase dramatically when the animal is moving, whereas in primates locomotion has a weak impact on responses in the primary visual cortex (V1). These differences raise questions about the existence and universality of computational principles underlying sensory coding during behavior. We take a normativ

The hippocampus plays a key role in cognitive map formation. As an abstract model of the world, it has to balance the demands of accurate, yet general, predictions. Despite a long-lasting interest in hippocampal computations, the specific contributions of distinct hippocampal subregions remain debated. Evidence from rodents and humans suggests that subregion CA3 represents event-specific information, while subregion CA1 encodes more generalized information.The free-energy principle entails that neural networks with more generalized representations operate closer to criticality, where external

An animal’s behavioral state is reflected in the dynamics of population activity and its capacity to process sensory information. Previous studies in mammalian brains have demonstrated a relationship between behavioral states and information processing (Lee et al., 2016, 2019, 2020). However, these studies have been limited to exploring how population dynamics and sensory representation changes in specific cortical areas. Thanks to its transparency at early life stage and the advent of selective plane illumination microscopy, the zebrafish brain is an attractive model that allow for whole brai