Sensorimotor learning and control across timescales

Description du projet

Zoom sur les interactions flexibles du cerveau avec le monde

L’éventail des mouvements que nous sommes capables d’effectuer évolue tout au long de notre vie, mais les mécanismes cérébraux sous-jacents demeurent mal compris. Les zones clés impliquées dans le contrôle du mouvement, telles que le cortex moteur et les noyaux gris centraux, remplissent des fonctions qui évoluent à mesure que nous acquérons de nouvelles compétences, que nous exécutons des gestes bien rodés ou que nous les adaptons à de nouvelles conditions. Le projet SELECT, financé par le CER, va enregistrer l’activité et manipuler des zones sensori-motrices clés du cerveau tandis que des souris apprennent, exécutent et adaptent des mouvements complexes d’atteinte et de préhension. Cette recherche permettra de définir l’évolution des fonctions remplies par ces zones. Les travaux permettront de mieux comprendre comment le cerveau facilite des interactions flexibles avec le monde, contribuant ainsi à une compréhension systémique des troubles du mouvement.

Objectif

Our ability to move is acquired during development and continuously expanded and flexibly adapted during our lifetime. Yet, the details of how our brains endow us with malleable motor repertoires remain elusive. Lesion studies and observations in neurological patients have identified cortical and subcortical regions that are necessary for movement. Similar research inspired mapping specific behavioural functions (computations) onto specific brain regions. For example, accurate control of limb movement was associated with the motor cortex, and its invigoration with the subcortical nuclei of the basal ganglia. Yet, recent findings in animals paint a more complex picture. Evidence of partial compensation after some focal lesions suggest that different brain regions can perform similar computations. Besides, the contribution of a brain region to motor control may be surprisingly fluid: motor cortex lesions can have no effect when executing certain learnt skills, even if animals cannot learn those skills without it. These two pieces of data support my core hypothesis: the computations mediating movement are distributed across cortico-subcortical regions, and change fluidly as animals learn a new skill, execute it, or adapt it to new conditions. Recent theoretical and computational methods that I have helped establish, together with innovations in neural recording and manipulation techniques provide unprecedented access to the rapid, distributed and often simultaneous computations mediating behaviour. Armed with these advances, we will record from key cortico-basal ganglia regions (and beyond) as mice learn, perform, and adapt the same challenging skill. Detailed investigation of these unique datasets will help us define the evolving distributed computations these regions perform. This timely, multidisciplinary research will shed light into how our brains allow us to flexibly interact with the world and others, paving the way to a systems-level view of movement disorders.