Topic: motor execution

Instinctive behaviours, such as hunting and defense, are part of the natural repertoire of behaviours that are shaped by evolution and critical for the survival of both individual and species. The midbrain periaqueductal gray (PAG) has emerged as a bottleneck in the routing of most instinctive behaviours, translating sensory and cognitive information into an appropriate motor response. Yet, the exact mechanisms of this translation remain elusive. We aimed to identify the neural circuits in the brainstem bridging the initiation and execution of instinctive behaviours in mice by developing an an

Previous neurophysiological and imaging research has implicated a widely distributed array of brain regions in perceptual decision-making. However, identifying primary decision-forming regions as distinct from sensory encoding and motor activity that correlate them has been challenging, in significant part due to uncertainty in the identifying criteria applied. Here we applied the paradigms and criteria previously used to identify an EEG signature of motor-independent evidence accumulation (O'Connell, Dockree, & Kelly 2012), in an fMRI study. It involved a mental counting task assessing vi