Sensorimotor processing articles within Nature

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  • Article |

    Single motor neurons in Drosophila are stimulated to show that they direct head movements towards specific postures rather than generating fixed movement vectors, suggesting that the brain controls movements through a continuing proprioceptive–motor loop.

    • Benjamin Gorko
    • , Igor Siwanowicz
    •  & Stephen J. Huston

  • Article |

    Excitatory pyramidal neurons preferentially target inhibitory interneurons with the same selectivity and, in turn, inhibitory interneurons preferentially target pyramidal neurons with opposite selectivity, forming an opponent inhibition motif that supports decision-making.

    • Aaron T. Kuan
    • , Giulio Bondanelli
    •  & Wei-Chung Allen Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here we show how PFL2 and PFL3 neurons in the Drosophila brain compare a representation of direction with internal spatial goals, both anchored in world-centric coordinates, and produce body-centric steering commands that act to correct deviations from the goal direction. 

    • Elena A. Westeinde
    • , Emily Kellogg
    •  & Rachel I. Wilson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Drosophila egg-deposition motor programme is initiated once a rise-to-threshold process hits a threshold, and subthreshold variation in this process regulates the time spent considering options.

    • Vikram Vijayan
    • , Fei Wang
    •  & Gaby Maimon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Analysis of behaviour, physiology, anatomy and connectomics in Drosophila shows how direction-specific visual information is transformed onto downstream premotor networks and converted into appropriate motor responses.

    • Mark Dombrovski
    • , Martin Y. Peek
    •  & Gwyneth M. Card

  • Article
    | Open Access

    A study demonstrates that plasticity in the head direction system in Drosophila is modulated by dopamine, which increases learning when reorienting movements are bringing in new spatial information.

    • Yvette E. Fisher
    • , Michael Marquis
    •  & Rachel I. Wilson

  • Article |

    Odour motion contains valuable directional information that is absent from the airflow alone, and Drosophila use this directional information to shape their navigational decisions.

    • Nirag Kadakia
    • , Mahmut Demir
    •  & Thierry Emonet

  • Article |

    High-resolution volumetric calcium imaging was used to create a functional atlas of the Drosophila melanogaster ventral brain and identify how and where metabolic and reproductive states alter processing of food-related sensory stimuli.

    • Daniel Münch
    • , Dennis Goldschmidt
    •  & Carlos Ribeiro

  • Article |

    Noradrenaline-expressing neurons in the locus coeruleus in mouse facilitate task execution and encode reinforcement in learning tasks, via partially modular projections to the cortex.

    • Vincent Breton-Provencher
    • , Gabrielle T. Drummond
    •  & Mriganka Sur

  • Article |

    In male zebra finches, song practice and courtship song performance are associated with distinct patterns of neural activity in the basal ganglia, resulting in reduced vocal variability during performance.

    • Jonnathan Singh Alvarado
    • , Jack Goffinet
    •  & Richard Mooney

  • Article |

    Three-dimensional imaging of the lingual kinematics of mice drinking from a water spout reveals that successful licks have the hallmarks of online motor control, requiring rapid adjustments controlled by anterolateral motor cortex.

    • Tejapratap Bollu
    • , Brendan S. Ito
    •  & Jesse H. Goldberg

  • Article |

    Simultaneous mapping of activity across the cortex and dorsal striatum in mice shows that activity in each part of the striatum precisely mirrors that in topographically associated cortical regions, consistently across behavioural contexts.

    • Andrew J. Peters
    • , Julie M. J. Fabre
    •  & Matteo Carandini

  • Article |

    In macaque motor cortex, moment-to-moment fluctuations in neurally derived decision variables are tightly linked to decision state and predict behavioural choices with better accuracy than condition-averaged decision variables or the visual stimulus alone, and can be used to distinguish between different models of decision making.

    • Diogo Peixoto
    • , Jessica R. Verhein
    •  & William T. Newsome

  • Article |

    A new method for analysing change in high-dimensional data is based on nearest-neighbour statistics and is applied here to song dynamics during vocal learning in zebra finches, but could potentially be applied to other biological and artificial behaviours.

    • Sepp Kollmorgen
    • , Richard H. R. Hahnloser
    •  & Valerio Mante

  • Article |

    Two-photon calcium imaging and optogenetic experiments in tethered flying flies, combined with modelling, demonstrate how the correlation of compass and visual neurons underpins plasticity that enables the transformation of visual cues into stable heading representations.

    • Sung Soo Kim
    • , Ann M. Hermundstad
    •  & Vivek Jayaraman

  • Article |

    A neural decoder uses kinematic and sound representations encoded in human cortical activity to synthesize audible sentences, which are readily identified and transcribed by listeners.

    • Gopala K. Anumanchipalli
    • , Josh Chartier
    •  & Edward F. Chang

  • Letter |

    Evidence from hippocampal place cells shows that path-integration gain, previously thought to be a constant factor in the computation of location, is flexible and can be rapidly fine-tuned.

    • Ravikrishnan P. Jayakumar
    • , Manu S. Madhav
    •  & James J. Knierim

  • Letter |

    The discovery of a visual-looming-sensitive neuron, LPLC2, that provides input to the Drosophila escape pathway, and uses dendrites patterned to integrate directionally selective inputs to selectively encode outward motion.

    • Nathan C. Klapoetke
    • , Aljoscha Nern
    •  & Gwyneth M. Card

  • Letter |

    Calcium imaging data from mice performing a virtual reality auditory decision-making task are used to analyse the population codes in primary auditory and posterior parietal cortex that support choice behaviour.

    • Caroline A. Runyan
    • , Eugenio Piasini
    •  & Christopher D. Harvey

  • Article |

    Global mapping shows that mouse retinal neurons prefer visual motion produced when the animal moves along two behaviourally relevant axes, allowing the encoding of the animal’s every translation and rotation.

    • Shai Sabbah
    • , John A. Gemmer
    •  & David M. Berson

  • Letter |

    Activity in regions of the brain have been correlated with decision making but determining whether such relationships are correlative or causative has been challenging; using a technique to reversibly inactivate brain areas in monkeys reveals that although there is decision-related activity in the lateral intraparietal (LIP) area, LIP is not critical for the perceptual decisions studied here.

    • Leor N. Katz
    • , Jacob L. Yates
    •  & Alexander C. Huk

  • Article |

    Calcium imaging of the brain of tethered flies walking in a virtual reality arena showed that a population of neurons with dendrites that tile the ‘ellipsoid body’ use information from visual landmarks and the fly's own rotation to compute heading; this suggests insects possess neurons with similarities to ‘head direction cells’ known to contribute to spatial navigation in mammalian brains.

    • Johannes D. Seelig
    •  & Vivek Jayaraman

  • Article |

    Combining neural manipulation in freely behaving animals, physiological studies and electron microscopy reconstruction in the Drosophila larva identifies a complex multilsensory circuit involved in the selection of larval escape modes that exhibits a multilevel multimodal convergence architecture.

    • Tomoko Ohyama
    • , Casey M. Schneider-Mizell
    •  & Marta Zlatic

  • Article |

    This study tracks dragonfly head and body movements during high-velocity and high-precision prey-capture flights, and shows that the dragonfly uses predictive internal models and reactive control to build an interception trajectory that complies with biomechanical constraints.

    • Matteo Mischiati
    • , Huai-Ti Lin
    •  & Anthony Leonardo

  • Article |

    Here auditory cortex excitatory neurons are shown to decrease their activity during locomotion, grooming and vocalization, and this decrease was paralleled by increased activity in inhibitory interneurons; these findings provide a circuit basis for how self-motion and external sensory signals can be integrated to potentially facilitate hearing.

    • David M. Schneider
    • , Anders Nelson
    •  & Richard Mooney

  • Article |

    A population of spinal interneurons that form axo–axonic connections with the terminals of proprioceptive afferents are shown to mediate presynaptic inhibition; their ablation elicits harmonic oscillations during goal-directed forelimb movements, which can be modelled as the consequence of an increase in sensory feedback gain.

    • Andrew J. P. Fink
    • , Katherine R. Croce
    •  & Eiman Azim

  • Letter |

    Drosophila male courtship songs were thought to have a fixed structure with song repetition variations introduced unintentionally because of neural noise; this behavioural assay and computational modelling study instead reveals that males use fast changes in sensory information to actively pattern individual song sequences.

    • Philip Coen
    • , Jan Clemens
    •  & Mala Murthy

  • Letter |

    Direct neural recordings from electrodes over bilateral cortices show that sensory–motor transformations for speech occur bilaterally; neural responses are robust during both perception and production in an overt word-repetition task, and bilateral sensory–motor responses can perform transformations between speech-perception and speech-production representations during a non-word transformation task.

    • Gregory B. Cogan
    • , Thomas Thesen
    •  & Bijan Pesaran

  • Letter |

    Two-photon calcium imaging experiments reveal that ring neurons in the Drosophila central complex represent visual features and show direction-selective orientation tuning, resembling simple cells in mammalian primary visual cortex; future fly studies may enhance our understanding of circuit computations underlying visually guided action selection.

    • Johannes D. Seelig
    •  & Vivek Jayaraman

  • Article |

    Motor patterns underlying the rodent exploratory behaviours whisking and sniffing are coordinated by respiratory centres in the ventral medulla; a distinct region in the ventral medulla provides rhythmic input to the facial motor neurons that drive scanning by the vibrissae, and input from the pre-Bötzinger complex coordinates whisking with sniffing and basal breathing.

    • Jeffrey D. Moore
    • , Martin Deschênes
    •  & David Kleinfeld

  • Article |

    The auditory response of song premotor HVC neurons in sleeping birds, and HVC activity in singing birds, is synchronized with particular moments of vocal motor movements as defined by a dynamical systems model of song production; this HVC activity could be used as a ‘forward’ model to predict behaviour and evaluate feedback.

    • Ana Amador
    • , Yonatan Sanz Perl
    •  & Daniel Margoliash

  • Letter |

    In vivo whole-cell recordings combined with an intracellular N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) blocker and membrane hyperpolarization are used to examine the contribution of dendritic NMDAR-dependent regenerative responses to the angular tuning of layer 4 neurons; the results show that active dendritic processing sharpens the sensory responses of cortical neurons in vivo.

    • Maria Lavzin
    • , Sophia Rapoport
    •  & Jackie Schiller

  • Letter |

    A group of dopamine neurons that are distinct from those mediating aversive reinforcement is found to signal sugar reward in the fly brain, highlighting the evolutionarily conserved function of dopamine neurons in reward processing.

    • Chang Liu
    • , Pierre-Yves Plaçais
    •  & Hiromu Tanimoto

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