News & Events / BME Seminar Series / Current Speakers / 2020-21Matthew Perich, PhD
BME Seminar Series Winter 2021
Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 4:15-5:15 pm
This event will be held via Zoom
Host: Professor Lee Miller
Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Neuroscience
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Interactions between distinct brain regions shape cortical population dynamics
Behaviors such as navigation, running, and manipulating objects rely on continuous influx of sensory information about the body and the environment. Integrating behavior signals and sensory feedback requires the coordinated activity of numerous anatomically and functionally distinct brain regions. In my talk, I will explore how interactions between brain regions shape the activity of cortical populations. I will first present a series of experiments studying populations of neurons in two interacting brain regions - primary motor (M1) and somatosensory (S1) cortex - of macaque monkeys. While M1 is known to utilize somatic feedback from sensory regions such as S1 to accurately reach and manipulate objects, existing models of cortical dynamics have largely treated M1 activity as a feedforward generator of movement. I will present a new model of M1 dynamics where activity is shaped both by motor commands and sensory feedback. I will provide evidence that a “communication subspace” linking M1 and S1 enables sensory feedback to coexist with ongoing M1 dynamics to enable correction of behavioral errors. Next, I will expand beyond the interactions between two brain regions and introduce Current-Based Decomposition (CURBD), a new approach to infer brain-wide interactions by leveraging data-constrained recurrent neural network models. While many existing methods model the outputs of neurons (e.g., action potentials), CURBD provides an unprecedented view into brain-wide interactions by reconceptualizing population activity in terms of the inputs driving each neuron. Using large-scale calcium imaging of four regions of mouse cortex, I will demonstrate how CURBD can untangle movement-related information from strongly sensory regions like primary visual cortex. Together, these two studies emphasize how models of multi-region interactions can yield new insights into how the brain generates behavior.
Learn more about Dr. Matthew Perich and their research here.