Sensorimotor processing articles from across Nature Portfolio

Wide-field one-photon calcium imaging from new-world primates uncovers a small patch in the medial premotor areas uniquely representing reward expectancy in the frontoparietal cortex.

The authors describe a population of neurons in the navigation center of Drosophila that exhibits a persistent goal signal during olfactory navigation.

Locomotion emerges from a constant dialogue between the body and the physical environment, requiring both frictional interactions and mechanosensation to coordinate movement. By combining experiments and theory, the authors show that classical gentle-touch receptor neurons in C. elegans sense dynamic surface traction during crawling, uncovering a previously unrecognized role for skin mechanoreceptors in proprioceptive locomotion control.

How intrinsic dynamics structure sensory and movement representations in cortex remains unclear. Here, the authors show that these dynamics organize movement-stimulus interactions within low-dimensional manifolds while enabling sensory coding within separable off-manifold dimensions.

Functional heterogeneity of dorsal raphe nucleus is not fully understood. Here authors show topographically organized sensory and locomotor responses from the zebrafish dorsal raphe and its forebrain projections. Dorsal raphe ablation disrupts forebrain synchrony, weakens sensory and motor responses, and enhances defensive behaviors.

Cortical circuits prioritize diversity over categorical structure, supporting a computational regime geared towards high-dimensional, highly separable neural representations.

Detailed maps, or connectomes, of the fly brain and nervous system reveal how circuit architecture (wiring) shapes both neural activity and behavior. These maps already demonstrate that it is possible to predict function from structure, and provide the essential foundation for biologically realistic models of circuit function.

Head-direction cells act as a stable ‘neural compass’ as bats navigate across a large natural outdoor environment.

A new study finds that grid cells track a mouse’s position in local reference frames instead of a global frame of reference in a path integration task.