The Importance of Accounting for Movement When Relating Neuronal Activity to Sensory and Cognitive Processes

Abstract

A surprising finding of recent studies in mouse is the dominance of widespread movement-related activity throughout the brain, including in early sensory areas. In awake subjects, failing to account for movement risks misattributing movementrelated activity to other (e.g., sensory or cognitive) processes. In this article, we (1) review task designs for separating taskrelated and movement-related activity, (2) review three "case studies" in which not considering movement would have resulted in critically different interpretations of neuronal function, and (3) discuss functional couplings that may prevent us from ever fully isolating sensory, motor, and cognitive-related activity. Our main thesis is that neural signals related to movement are ubiquitous, and therefore ought to be considered first and foremost when attempting to correlate neuronal activity with task-related processes.

Behavioral origin of sound-evoked activity in mouse visual cortex

“…Finally, these observations suggest that changes in states or behavior may also explain other aspects of neural activity that have been previously interpreted as being multisensory 8 . Stereotyped body movements can be elicited not only by sounds [15][16][17][18] but also by images [34][35][36][37][38] and odors 35,39 .…”

“…Here, we consider a possible alternative explanation for these multisensory signals, based on low-dimensional changes in internal state and behavior 8 . Behavioral and state signals have profound effects on sensory areas.…”

Dorsolateral striatum, not motor cortex, is a bottleneck for responding to task-relevant stimuli in a learned whisker detection task in mice

“…This mechanism would be associated with a negative post-stimulus choice probability, in which activation predicts response suppression. In contrast, our distractor-aligned wMC recordings demonstrate a long-latency positive poststimulus choice probability in response to target trials (which likely reflects movement-related signaling during the response, (Zagha et al, 2022)) and chance level choice probability in response to distractor stimuli (data not shown). This discrepancy between representation and function may suggest an alternative mechanism of response inhibition, in which the baseline (pre-stimulus) activity tonically and pro-actively suppresses response triggering.…”

Long-term stability of single neuron activity in the motor system

“…As a result, our reported neural stability in relation to both the learned and innate motor behaviors, and similar reports from other studies, should be seen as lower bounds on the neural stability associated with a hypothetical perfectly stable behavior. Additionally, this observation of correlated neural and behavioral drift highlights the importance of high-resolution behavioral measurements when investigating the stability of neural circuit dynamics, since most tasks studied in neuroscience do not fully constrain behavioral output (Zagha et al, 2022).…”