Sensory cues

…by the interplay between multimodal sensory information and the internal states of each animal. Here, we investigate this interplay in female Drosophila (fruit fly) as she engages with the male during courtship, a highly dynamic social behavior. Previous work has shown that the male fly's courtship song is shaped by the subtle feedback cues from the female and is influenced by his internal states1,2. However, in the case of females, prior work has focused only on predicting her walking speed averaged over minutes3,4; her fast timescale res

…- how animals process dynamic sensory cues from a partner, make decisions, and pattern the appropriate action for the current context. During Drosophila social interactions, males produce time-varying songs via wing vibration, while females arbitrate mating decisions. We discovered that male song structure and intensity are continually sculpted by the movements of the female, over timescales ranging from tens of milliseconds to minutes, and we have investigated the underlying circuit mechanism

A vast variety of sensory cues are represented as distinct patterns of neural responses in the brain. To retrieve memories associated with sensory cues, one would assume that the representations of sensory signals should be stable over time. However, recent development of population-level recording techniques has revealed that these representations can drift over time $^{1}$. To investigate the mechanisms and consequences of representational drift, we formulate a random feedforward network model $^{2,3}$ that incorporates stochastic fluctuations in membrane potential and synaptic strength $^{4

…We propose that in the hippocampus, sensory cues can parse spatial representations coded by hippocampal units thereby facilitating spatial learning.To test this hypothesis, mice were trained on a difficult spatial task in a large environment: they had to learn the positions of water rewards on a double cheeseboard maze, with two sets of rewards on two separate platforms. These rewards contained either no odour (NO-O

Most animals evolved with bilateral symmetry. Yet, many behaviors, from tying shoelaces to playing sports, require asymmetric motions and frequent transitions between the use of different sides of the body. Sidedness (whether the movement is produced on the right or left side of the body) therefore constitutes a critical aspect of the behavior, in addition to the sequence of actions that compose a behavior. We do not know how neural circuits coordinate these two aspects of behavior in any system. To solve this problem, we take advantage of a quantifiable, yet complex behavior produced by Droso

…is updated based on self-motion cues and external sensory information, such as visual features and wind direction. Thus far, the he

…relationship between these external sensory cues

…that examine the interaction between sensory cues and motor activity, using behavioral manipulations and neurophysiological recordings from pairs of awake, duetting wrens. I will show evidence that auditory cues link the brains of the wr

…of spatial exploration in which sensory cues are abundant, all grid-cells in the MEC represent the animal’s position in space and their joint activity lies on a two-dim

…behavior: animals often seek out sensory cues that will inform them about the properties of uncertain future rewards, even when there is no way for them to use this information to influence the reward outcome, and even when this information comes at a considerable cost. Evidence from monkey electrophysiology and human fMRI studies suggests that orbitofrontal cortex and midbrain dopamine neurons represent the subjective value of knowledge during information seeking behavior. However, it remains un