SELECT · Sensorimotor learning and control across timescales

Our ability to move is acquired during development and continuously expanded and flexibly adapted during our lifetime. Yet, the details of how our brains endow us with malleable motor repertoires remain elusive. Lesion studies and observations in neurological patients have identified cortical and subcortical regions that are necessary for movement. Similar research inspired mapping specific behavioural functions (computations) onto specific brain regions. For example, accurate control of limb movement was associated with the motor cortex, and its invigoration with the subcortical nuclei of the basal ganglia. Yet, recent findings in animals paint a more complex picture. Evidence of partial compensation after some focal lesions suggest that different brain regions can perform similar computations. Besides, the contribution of a brain region to motor control may be surprisingly fluid: motor cortex lesions can have no effect when executing certain learnt skills, even if animals cannot learn those skills without it. These two pieces of data support my core hypothesis: the computations mediating movement are distributed across cortico-subcortical regions, and change fluidly as animals learn a new skill, execute it, or adapt it to new conditions. Recent theoretical and computational methods that I have helped establish, together with innovations in neural recording and manipulation techniques provide unprecedented access to the rapid, distributed and often simultaneous computations mediating behaviour. Armed with these advances, we will record from key cortico-basal ganglia regions (and beyond) as mice learn, perform, and adapt the same challenging skill. Detailed investigation of these unique datasets will help us define the evolving distributed computations these regions perform. This timely, multidisciplinary research will shed light into how our brains allow us to flexibly interact with the world and others, paving the way to a systems-level view of movement disorders.