Topic: grooming

What are the spatial and temporal scales of brainwide neuronal activity, and how do activities at different scales interact? We used SCAPE microscopy to image a large fraction of the central brain of adult Drosophila melanogaster with high spatiotemporal resolution while flies engaged in a variety of behaviors, including running, grooming and flailing. This revealed neural representations of behavior on multiple spatial and temporal scales. The activity of most neurons across the brain correlated (or, in some cases, anticorrelated) with running and flailing over timescales that ranged from sec

Quantitative behavioral analyses have become an essential tool for understanding neural circuits. For example, recent studies have shown that ongoing “spontaneous” behaviors drive large fractions of neural activity in the mouse brain. However, the specific behavioral features encoded and their consistency across mice remain unknown. To study the neural representation of interpretable behavioral features, we recorded the activity of ~50,000 neurons in the mouse visual cortex during spontaneous behaviors. We used simultaneous five-camera video recordings to show that orofacial behaviors contain

Spontaneous, naturalistic behaviors comprise most of an animal’s lifetime. However, understanding how the brain encodes complex naturalistic behavior remains a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Decades of research has shown that performance on overtrained, task-based, goal-oriented behaviors can be decoded from neural activity recorded in areas of the corticostriatal axis, namely primary motor cortex (M1) and dorsal striatum (DS). More recently, single-unit responses during the execution of trained behaviors were found to be stable over a timescale of weeks in M1. However, it is currently