Topic: Innate behaviors

We can perform a diverse range of innate and learned behaviors – from running and jumping to a swift tennis serve – with remarkable coordination and grace. While skillful execution of innate and learned behaviors is supported by sensorimotor striatum, how this region encodes behavior remains poorly understood. Studies based on learned skills suggest striatal neurons represent skills as neural sequences, with each neuron locked to a feature of the stereotyped motor output. However, whether this coding scheme generalizes to innate behaviors or emerges through learning is not known. One possibili