Topic: population recordings

Nuo Li (Baylor College of Medicine, USA) shares novel insights into coordinated interhemispheric large-scale neural network activity underpinning short-term memory in mice. Relevant techniques covered include: simultaneous multi-regional recordings using multiple 64-channel H probes during head-fixed behavior in mice. simultaneous optogenetics and population recording. analysis of population recordings to infer interactions between brain regions. Reference: Chen G, Kang B, Lindsey J, Druckmann S, Li N, (2021). Modularity and robustness of frontal cortex networks. Cell, 184(14):3717-3730.

Motor and premotor cortical activities reflect motor planning and execution. For stereotyped movements, the internal cortical state should be predictive of subsequent motor commands. We developed a statistical method to infer a nonlinear state-space model that extracts an effective systems-level description of neural dynamics from population recordings. Without the knowledge of the task, target, or motor behavior, the inferred model can forecast neural activity at a single-trial level. Our novel inference algorithm performs approximate Bayesian filtering and smoothing within a structured varia