Topic: steering

Sensorimotor systems are inherently uncertain, either because of the physical nature of the sensory stimulus or because of noise within neural circuits. To curtail such limitations, sensorimotor systems combine information about the same event across different sensory sources to create robust internal representations for behavioral performance. Here we show that congruent multimodal self-movement signals are consistently found throughout populations of visual neurons, the lobula plate tangential cells (LPTCs). LPTCs monitor head and/or body rotations to support steering during locomotion1-3. W

Animals employ different behavioral strategies to achieve the goal of sensory navigation. However, the factors that drive switches between different strategies---and the neural mechanisms underlying them---remain largely unknown. The nematode worm C. elegans is known to exhibit distinct “steering” and “turning” strategies during navigation, where steering involves continuous, gradual changes in orientation, and turning involves infrequent, major reorientation events. It is commonly assumed that the worm’s responses to sensory input, whether steering or turning, are independent behavioral actio