CRCNS: Integrating sensory and prior information to control behavior

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A fundamental goal of systems neuroscience is to describe how sensory inputs are integrated and guide an animal's behavior. To be able to integrate these inputs, early sensory systems have developed selectivities for specific stimulus features that allow them to analyze the inputs using these features as basis. We aim to uncover how disparate motion signals are integrated to produce a global percept of motion, and to understand the conditions in which such integration fails. Our proposal reflects the fact that adaptive behaviors in complex environments face numerous challenges, from processing noisy and uncertain visual motion information to predict future events on target trajectory contingencies and its interactions with a dynamic, cluttered environment. We propose to use dynamic inference as an efficient theoretical framework to understand how the brain integrates Prior knowledges elaborated from statistical regularities of natural environments with different sources of information across different time scales in order to extract relevant motion information from the sensory flow and predict future events or actions. The smooth pursuit system is an excellent probe of such hierarchical dynamical inferences from target motion computation to target trajectory prediction. In marmosets, we have access to populations of neurons in pivotal cortical areas along the occipito-parieto- frontal network that have been identified in non-human and human primates. We seek to uncover a unifying empirical and theoretical framework to capture inference across different time scales. RELEVANCE (See instructions): We will examine how incoming sensory signals interact with prior experiences to guide behavior, using dynamic inference as a theoretical framework. This study uses a specific tracking behavior (smooth pursuit) to shed light on the fundamental problem of how the coordinated activity of large populations of sensory neurons is parsed and converted into appropriate behaviors in the face of changing contexts, uncertainty, and noise, a process disrupted in neurological disorders such as schizophrenia.