CTCN Seminar Series: Anne Churchland, PhD

Movements and engagement during perceptual decision-making

Anne Churchland, PhD
Professor of Neurobiology
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles

Switching between cognitive states is a natural tendency, even for trained experts. To test how cognitive state impacts the relationship between neural activity and behavior, we measured cortex-wide neural activity during decision-making in mice. Task variables and instructed movements elicited similar neural responses regardless of state, but the neural activity associated with spontaneous, uninstructed movements became highly variable during disengagement. Surprisingly, this heightened variability was not due to an increase in movements: behavioral videos showed equally frequent movements in both cognitive states. But while the movement frequency remained similar, movement timing changed: as animals slipped into disengagement, their movements became erratically timed. These idiosyncratic movements were a strong predictor of task performance and drove the increased variance that we observed in the neural activity. Taken together, our results argue that the temporal structure of movement patterns constitutes an embodied signature of cognitive state with profound impacts on neural activity.