Topic: Generalized Additive Models

Highly-social animals, like humans, live with many individuals, and interact with each other at times, locations and manner of their choosing. However, neurophysiological investigations of social responses are rarely conducted in such rich settings. To determine how the brain represents social information in a naturalistic setting – when the animals’ behavior is not experimentally constrained to a particular task – we constructed a bat cave for a colony of 5–10 bats of both sexes. The bats lived there 24×7, free to engage in any behaviors. Every day we conducted a ~3 hour experimental session,

Whole-body movements like locomotion require timely and precise coordination of multiple effectors. Moreover, control needs to be robust and flexible to changes in the state of the body and environment. How is such a complex control problem solved by the brain? The cerebellum is critical for coordinating movement; during locomotion it is particularly important for interlimb and whole-body coordination. Decades of recordings have consistently shown that Purkinje cell modulation (the sole output of the cerebellar cortex) is broadly correlated with the locomotor stride cycle. However, much of the

The cerebellum is critical for coordinating movement, and during locomotion it is particularly important for interlimb coordination. Decades of recordings have consistently shown that cerebellar Purkinje cell modulation is broadly correlated with the locomotor stride cycle. However, much of the firing rate variability has remained unexplained, and it is not yet clear how Purkinje cell population activity could be read out to control whole-body coordination. Here, we performed cell-attached recordings of Purkinje cell simple spike activity in head-fixed mice locomoting for liquid rewards, toget