Mackenzie Mathis: Dissecting the role of forelimb somatosensory cortex during motor adaptation

Rowland Institute, Harvard

Skilled movements require the agent to learn to adapt to dynamic environments to improve performance over time. While many circuits from the cortex to the spinal cord are active and required for generating effective movements, it remains unclear how neural circuits across the brain coordinate, adapt, and contribute to movement. In my talk, I will first discuss our efforts to develop a force-field adaptation task for mice, and how somatosensory cortex is essential for learning to adapt. I will also discuss a highly efficient method for markerless pose-estimation based on transfer learning with deep neural networks that achieves excellent results with minimal training data (which we call DeepLabCut). For example, during the skilled reaching behavior in mice, individual joints can be automatically tracked, and even when a small number of frames are labeled (~150), the algorithm achieves excellent tracking performance on test frames that is comparable to human accuracy. This is now allowing us to correlate neural activity across sensorimotor cortex with detailed 3D movements of the animal.

 

BCCN Berlin Graduation ceremony and Christmas Party after the talk!

 

Guests are welcome!

 

Organized by

Michael Brecht / Margret Franke

Location

BCCN Berlin, lecture hall, Philippstr. 13 Haus 6, 10115 Berlin