Premotor cortex

Recent studies have proposed that neural circuits have a $\textit{task manifold}$: i.e., a subset of the neural state-space to which neural activity is confined as an animal performs a task [1]. Thus, discovering and characterising these manifolds and their associated dynamics from experimental data can shed light on the neural computations unfolding within the brain during various cognitive tasks. Yet, common manifold discovery methods often do not take into account that neural data is generated by an underlying dynamical system. To address this, we first derive a general class of manifolds t

…In premotor cortex, intermingled neurons are activated during movement planning and execution but also in response to contextual cues, and reward. However, probing the behavioural role of these ensembles and understanding the circuit mechanisms underlying dynamic ensemble formation has been challenging due to the difficulty of flexibly manipulating individual c

Ischemic stroke, a major cause of adult disability, results from the blockage of blood flow to the brains, leading to neurological impairments. After a stroke, the neural circuits in the peri-infarct zone undergo plastic changes to allow a spontaneous restoration of the neurological function. However, the extent of spontaneous recovery is highly variable among patients, underscoring the need for neurophysiological biomarkers to predict recovery outcomes and guide treatment strategies. Employing a well-established model of ischemic stroke in mice, the distal middle cerebral artery occlusion (dM

Reinforcement learning implies to associate an outcome with an action performed in the past, sometimes several seconds after its execution. How the artificial intelligence and brain associate these two events refers to the credit assignment problem (CAP). We hypothesized that the required temporal convergence of an eligibility trace encoding the planned action, and the referring outcome of that action takes place in the same brain area, to reinforce an optimal policy. By using a combination of pharmacogenetic/optogenetic manipulations and one-photon calcium imaging in awake behaving mice, we p

…neuronal activity recorded from the premotor cortex (PMd) of three monkeys while performing a modified version of the stop signal task. In this task, the motivation to either act or inhibit action was manipulated using Cues that informed about different reward contexts. We conducted an

Persistent, stimulus-dependent neuronal activity has been observed in numerous brain areas during tasks that require the temporary maintenance of information. Several competing hypotheses for the neuronal mechanisms underlying persistent activity have been proposed. We have employed data-driven models in conjunction with optogenetic disruptions of neural circuits within memory-guided motor tasks. Our findings revealed a mechanism governed by dynamic attractors, pivotal in sustaining neuronal activity. This mechanism, shaped by time-varying inputs reflecting temporal predictions, is instrumenta

…This webinar will focus on mouse premotor cortex in relation to learned lick-timing and explore high-density electrophysiology using our silicon neural probes alongside region and cell-type-specific acute genetic manipulations of proteins required for synaptic plasticity.

Higher cortical areas carry a wide range of sensory, cognitive, and motor signals supporting complex goal-directed behavior. These signals mix in heterogeneous responses of single neurons, making it difficult to untangle underlying mechanisms. I will present two approaches for revealing interpretable circuit mechanisms from heterogeneous neural responses during cognitive tasks. First, I will show a flexible nonparametric framework for simultaneously inferring population dynamics on single trials and tuning functions of individual neurons to the latent population state. When applied to recordin

…of single neurons in prefrontal and premotor c

…in the ‘hand knob’ area of left premotor cortex of a participant with tetraplegia (‘T5’) while he attempted different hand gestures. Trials varied across

Decisions are often guided by detecting subtle signals in a dynamic sensory environment. Although the brain must track such decision-relevant signals, how they are represented and transformed by neural activity across the sensorimotor axis remains poorly understood. Here, we recorded neural activity with Neuropixels probes across dozens of brain regions while mice performed a visual change-detection task. We trained mice to detect a sustained increase in temporal-frequency (TF) of a drifting grating stimulus, whose speed fluctuates stochastically around the mean of 1Hz. The task requires mice

Signals related to self generated movements are broadcast to non-motor brain regions, and can be detected across wide regions of the forebrain in mice. Indeed, it has been observed that, even during the performance of a task, incidental movements, or ‘fidgets’, account for much more variance in neural activity than task-related movements and task-related variables. Some bodily movements or expressions, such as those of the face, reflect biologically significant expressions of internal state, that is, emotions, which have important relationships with ongoing cognitive processes such as decision

Natural perception relies inherently on inferring causal structure in the environment. However, the neural mechanisms and functional circuits that are essential for representing and updating the hidden causal structure during multisensory processing are unknown. To address this, monkeys were trained to infer the probability of a potential common source from visual and proprioceptive signals on the basis of their spatial disparity in a virtual reality system. The proprioceptive drift reported by monkeys demonstrated that they combined historical information and current multisensory signals to e