Mesoscale cortex-wide neural dynamics predict goal-directed, but not random actions in mice several seconds prior to movement
- University of British Columbia, Canada
- University of Florida, United States
- University of Ottawa, Canada
Abstract
Volition - the sense of control or agency over one's voluntary actions - is widely recognized as the basis of both human subjective experience and natural behavior in non-human animals. Several human studies have found peaks in neural activity preceding voluntary actions, e.g. the readiness potential (RP), and some have shown upcoming actions could be decoded even before awareness. Others propose that random processes underlie and explain pre-movement neural activity. Here we seek to address these issues by evaluating whether pre-movement neural activity in mice contains structure beyond that present in random neural activity. Implementing a self-initiated water-rewarded lever pull paradigm in mice while recording widefield [Ca++] neural activity we find that cortical activity changes in variance seconds prior to movement and that upcoming lever pulls could be predicted between 3 to 5 seconds (or more in some cases) prior to movement. We found inhibition of motor cortex starting at approximately 5sec prior to lever pulls and activation of motor cortex starting at approximately 2sec prior to a random unrewarded left limb movement. We show that mice, like humans, are biased towards commencing self-initiated actions during specific phases of neural activity but that the pre-movement neural code changes over time in some mice and is widely distributed as behavior prediction improved when using all vs single cortical areas. These findings support the presence of structured multi-second neural dynamics preceding self-initiated action beyond that expected from random processes. Our results also suggest that neural mechanisms underlying self-initiated action could be preserved between mice and humans.
Data availability
Code for generating all figures is provided here:https://github.com/catubc/elife_self_init_paperDatasets are provided on Dryad under the information below:Mitelut, Catalin (2022), Mesoscale cortex-wide neural dynamics predict self-initiated actions in mice several seconds prior to movement, Dryad,Dataset, https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.ttdz08m0z
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Mesoscale cortex-wide neural dynamics predict self-initiated actions in mice several seconds prior to movementDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.ttdz08m0z.
Article and author information
Author details
Nicholas V Swindale
Funding
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (MOP-15360)
- Catalin Mitelut
- Yongxu Zhang
- Yuki Sekino
- Jamie D Boyd
- Federico Bollanos
- Nicholas V Swindale
- Greg Silasi
- Timothy H Murphy
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (MOP-12675)
- Catalin Mitelut
- Yongxu Zhang
- Yuki Sekino
- Jamie D Boyd
- Federico Bollanos
- Nicholas V Swindale
- Greg Silasi
- Shreya Saxena
- Timothy H Murphy
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Mouse protocols were approved by the University of British Columbia Animal Care Committee and followed the Canadian Council on Animal Care and Use guidelines (protocols A13-0336 and A14-0266).
Copyright
© 2022, Mitelut et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Mesoscale cortex-wide neural dynamics predict goal-directed, but not random actions in mice several seconds prior to movement
eLife 11:e76506.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.76506
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