Topic: brain-wide activity

Working memory (WM) retains information during delay periods. How global neuronal activities maintain WM remains unclear. We recorded brain-wide activity via Neuropixels in mice performing a delay-varying olfactory WM task, to reveal animal’s capacity in maintaining both olfaction and duration information simultaneously. Neurons encoded WM information predominantly in transient patterns and generated cross-region activity waves, reflecting distinct cell assemblies that encoded olfaction-only, duration-only, or both information. The regional proportion of neurons and wave timing within cell ass

The vertebrate telencephalon is the site of complex cognitive processes such as spatial cognition. The larval zebrafish telencephalon is a compact circuit of ~10,000 neurons that nevertheless contains homologous structures to the mammalian basal ganglia and limbic system (e.g. hippocampus and amygdala). However, despite long-standing evidence that spatial navigation and learning in adult fish requires an intact telencephalon, cells believed to underlie spatial cognition in mammals (e.g. place and grid cells) have yet to be established in any fish species. Using a tracking microscope to image b

Recent studies have shown that behavioral information is richly distributed across the brain, but how individual neurons across the brain encode behavior is largely unknown. However, it is challenging to record/interpret high quality single neuron traces across the brain. Here, we describe new hardware/software and analytical tools to address this. We engineered a microscope to record brain-wide activity and behavior of freely-moving C. elegans, wrote new image analysis software, and developed a probabilistic encoder model to delineate how each neuron encodes specific behavioral features. Extr

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

The vertebrate telencephalon is the site of complex cognitive processes, such as spatial cognition. The larval zebrafish telencephalon is a compact circuit of only ~10,000 neurons that contains potentially homologous structures to the mammalian basal ganglia and limbic system (e.g., the hippocampus). However, despite long-standing evidence that spatial navigation and learning in zebrafish requires an intact telencephalon, cells believed to underlie spatial cognition in the mammalian hippocampus (e.g., place cells) have yet to be established in any fish species. Using a tracking microscope to i