Motor skill learning and execution in a distributed brain network

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Event details

Date 05.03.2019
Hour 10:0011:00
Speaker Dr Steffen Wolff, Harvard University, USA.
Location
Category Conferences - Seminars

Most of our every-day behaviors are built from complex sequences of movements, whether it is tying our shoes, serving a tennis serve or playing the piano. The ability to perform such actions, often with little mental effort, depends on the distributed motor network in our brains. While many individual components of this network have been identified, less is known about their specific roles and how they interact during learning and execution of complex motor skills. To address these questions in detail, we developed a fully automated high-throughput behavioral training system as well as continuous long-term electrophysiological recordings. Using these technical advances, I am training rats in a timed lever-pressing task that produces complex and highly stereotyped movement sequences. I am probing the contributions of individual brain regions and their inter-connections by recording and manipulating their activities. In my talk, I will show that the basal ganglia, specifically the dorsolateral striatum (DLS), play a central role in the acquisition and execution of motor skills. I will further describe the specific roles of cortical and thalamic input to the DLS in these processes and suggest a circuit-level model of skill learning in which motor cortex guides plasticity at thalamo-striatal synapses.

Bio
After completing a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in Molecular Biotechnology at the Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg, Germany, and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, Steffen Wolff joined the lab of Prof. Andreas Lüthi at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland, for his PhD. His thesis work was on the role of genetically- and anatomically-defined neuronal populations in the amygdala and in cortex during fear learning. After receiving his PhD, Steffen Wolff became a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Bence Ölveczky at Harvard University in Cambridge, USA. He is currently finishing his interrogation of the circuitry underlying learning and execution of complex motor skills, focusing on the interactions between the motor cortex, the basal ganglia and the thalamus.

Video transmission using zoom : https://epfl.zoom.us/j/9946495775
 

Practical information

  • Informed public
  • Free

Organizer

  • Center for Neuroprosthetics

Contact

  • cnp@epfl.ch

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