Topic: tongue-reaching movements

Goal-directed behaviors involve coordinated activity across neurons representing different cognitive variables that guide the appropriate action selection. Here we used a novel naturalistic behavioral paradigm that does not require pre-training, which allowed studying the underlying neural activity from the very first day of behavior. This paradigm involves tongue-reaching movements towards multiple target-positions, followed by a variable reward outcome. The target was presented on a grid (typically consisting of 4x4 possible target positions) in front of the mouse’s face. We used calcium ima

Goal-directed behavior requires the coordinated activity of sensory and motor areas across the brain. Recent advances in large-scale neural recordings allow studying brain-wide dynamics during behavior at cellular resolution. We used mesoscale calcium imaging to record the activity of up to ~30,000 neurons simultaneously (~1,000,000 neurons total) from over 10 cortical areas while mice performed a novel goal-directed naturalistic behavior. The behavior consisted of multipositional tongue-reaching movements to a target to obtain a water reward, with the target presented on a grid (typically con