Theory Center with Anne Churchland
From The Observatory
Date
December 2, 2025
Location
Jerome L. Greene Science Center
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Human and animal movements are often viewed as a nuisance that “muddies the waters” of efforts to link visual inputs to cognitive processes like decision-making. Such movements are often prevented via hardware, “regressed out” in analysis or simply ignored. However, in naturalistic circumstances, animals and humans make frequent movements during perceptual and cognitive tasks. These include large movements that optimally position the sensor (e.g., the fovea), or smaller, high frequency movements that add spectrotemporal content to a stimulus. Importantly, recent work has demonstrated that movements impact neural activity in early sensory areas, even in experts engaged making visual decisions.
In mice, cell-type specific measurements have demonstrated that movements modulate not only neurons that project corticocortically, but also neurons that project to subcortical targets, suggesting that cortical neurons broadcast movement signals throughout the brain. Further, movements modulate neural activity in both head-fixed and freely moving rodents, arguing that movements shape activity in multiple contexts.
These observations raise major outstanding questions about the nature of the movement signals, and they extent to which they reflect altered sensory inputs, efference copies, or underlying latent states.Key Speaker: Anne Churchland
Participants
Columbia University Zuckerman Institute
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At Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, our mission is to decipher the brain. We believe that understanding how the brain works — and gives rise to mind and behavior — is the most urgent and exciting challenge of our time.
Our passionate group of researchers is exploring how the brain develops, performs, endures and recovers to gain critical insights into human health and behavior for the benefit of people and societies everywhere.
Because the brain and mind are central to the human experience — shaping not only our thoughts and feelings, but also our motivations and actions — the potential for discovery is staggering.