Artur Schneider, Winner of the Bernstein CorTeC Award 2022: Toolbox for the Analysis of Motor Dynamics during Unrestrained Behavior

The seminar features a presentation of Artur Schneider about his awarded doctoral thesis. In the video below he gives a little sneak peek.

Our thanks go to Caroline Remke from CorTeC, who created this informative video with the awardee.

Abstract

Movement is the primary means of an organism interacting with its environment. To study neural processes underlying movement, neuroscientists often pursue the reductionist approach of reducing the variability of the task to a few controllable factors. However, such an approach limits our ability to understand the naturalistic dynamics of movement. Thus, there is a drive in neuroscience to study neural processes in more naturalistic environments and freely moving conditions.

In this work, we developed multiple complementary tools to help study neural processes in freely moving animals. To measure unconstrained movements, we developed FreiPose, a versatile framework to capture 3D motion during freely moving behavior, and combined the movement tracking of rats with electrophysiology. Using a modeling strategy, we described the ongoing neural activity as a combination of simultaneous multiplexed coding of multiple movement parameters. A virtual head-fixation approach was devised to distinguish paw movements from general movement information. Consequently, a large fraction of neurons in the motor cortex was uncovered to be tuned to paw trajectories. This tuning was previously masked by the influence of the varying body posture information.

We conclude that measuring the movements of freely moving animals is an essential step toward understanding the underlying neural dynamics.

	More about Artur and his research
	More about the Bernstein-CorTeC Award 2022