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SUMMARY:BMI Distinguished Seminar // Anne Churchland: Movements and engage
 ment during decision-making
DTSTART:20231108T160000
DTEND:20231108T170000
DTSTAMP:20260429T081808Z
UID:2f27367a9d66c87dedf0971f840311a4059d680d3afe1ff78b2c2a74
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Anne Churchland\, University of California Los Angeles\, USA\n
 When experts are immersed in a task\, a natural assumption is that their b
 rains prioritize task-related activity. Accordingly\, most efforts to unde
 rstand neural activity during well-learned tasks focus on cognitive comput
 ations and task-related movements. Surprisingly\, we observed that during 
 decision-making\, the cortex-wide activity of multiple cell types is domin
 ated by movements\, especially “uninstructed movements”\, that are spo
 ntaneously expressed. These observations argue that animals execute expert
  decisions while performing richly varied\, uninstructed movements that pr
 ofoundly shape neural activity. To understand the relationship between the
 se movements and decision-making\, we examined the movements more closely.
  We tested whether the magnitude or the timing of the movements was correl
 ated with decision-making performance. To do this\, we partitioned movemen
 ts into two groups: task-aligned movements that were well predicted by tas
 k events (such as the onset of the sensory stimulus or choice) and task in
 dependent movement (TIM) that occurred independently of task events. TIM h
 ad a reliable\, inverse correlation with performance in head-restrained mi
 ce and freely moving rats. This hinted that the timing of spontaneous move
 ments could indicate periods of disengagement. To confirm this\, we compar
 ed TIM to the latent behavioral states recovered by a hidden Markov model 
 with Bernoulli generalized linear model observations (GLM-HMM) and found t
 hese\, again\, to be inversely correlated. Finally\, we examined the impac
 t of these behavioral states on neural activity. Surprisingly\, we found t
 hat the same movement impacts neural activity more strongly when animals a
 re disengaged. An intriguing possibility is that these larger movement sig
 nals disrupt cognitive computations\, leading to poor decision-making perf
 ormance. Taken together\, these observations argue that movements and cogn
 ition are closely intertwined\, even during expert decision-making.\n 
LOCATION:SV 1717 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==SV%201717 https://epfl.zoom.u
 s/j/64813563657
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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