Project work performed in this period has covered animal surgery, training, imaging/acquisition, and neural analysis. It has also involved interdisciplinary activities between the host lab and other member labs of the International Brain Laboratory, in order to widely disseminate technology and infrastructure to study decision-making in the brain using a systematic, open-source approach to research.
Surgical techniques to access sensory, parietal, and motor regions of cortex for imaging was achieved and refined during this period, particularly with respect to motor cortex. This region of the brain is notoriously difficult to access due to the anatomy of the skull and the requirements of the implant, but persistent efforts have refined our methodology to make this preparation one now available to others in the host laboratory, within our collaboration, and across the field. This preparation marks the first time that mouse motor neurons have been accessible via two-photon imaging in our lab.
Behavioral hardware and software have been developed, refined, and disseminated to multiple laboratories, whose researchers are now generating standardized behavioral data from mice across the world. In this project, we highlighted a need for more widespread collaboration across neuroscience laboratories and committed to developing an open-source behavioral 'kit’ that deployed our research technology from the host lab to other labs. This work is disseminated publicly (International Brain Laboratory, 2020, doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.17.909838).
Over the period, we successfully trained mice on a behavioral task that required the integration of sensory (visual) information with history of reward outcomes and accurate action planning. We find that mice adapt their behavior in the face of changing environmental conditions (e.g. when the reward changes or when the visual information changes), similarly to how humans would adapt under dynamic environmental realities.
Our analysis of neural data collected during the behavioral task suggests that the brain very closely links sensory information available in the task with the action plan that mice associate with that sensory information. These early (unpublished) results suggest that, in lieu of clear cortical boundaries between areas that process vision and motion, there is extensive overlap in areas that code both sensory and motor information over the time that animals prepare to act during the task. The notion of serial, separate processing stages between vision and action does not seem to be supported by the neural activity observed in the brain areas we studied, and opens the door to continued study on how precisely brain areas work in concert to guide the body’s actions and decisions.
