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Creating a sense of space: bridging action and sensation
Time:
Thursday, 14/Sept/2023:
6:30pm - 7:30pm
Session Chair: Alessandro Vercelli, Neuroscience Institute Cavalieri Ottolenghi, University of Torino
Location:Sala Cinquecento
476 seats
SINS – Presidential Lecture | dedicated to Rita Levi-Montalcini
Presentations
Creating a sense of space: bridging action and sensation
Marco Tripodi
MRC Laboratory of Molecualr Biology, United Kingdom
Animals constantly produce movements that are directed towards elements of the external world. From the act of catching prey to that of grasping an object, animals need to map the location of objects within a body-centered spatial reference frame. The generation of such spatially-tuned actions requires two fundamental steps: firstly, the generation of a three-dimensional body-bound motor map; secondly, the implementation of behaviourally meaningful sensorimotor alignment. In this lecture, I will discuss first how neurons in the superior colliculus decode egocentric motor displacement vectors. I will show that these neurons are both necessary and sufficient to guide spatially-tuned goal-oriented actions, bridging spatial encoding and action initiation and potentially providing a shared platform serving both motor and cognitive demands. I will show that spatially coherent motor units are anatomically clustered in genetically defined modules, giving rise to a discrete and discontinuous representation of the motor space. I will then move on to discuss how an ethologically meaningful sensorimotor alignment is implemented. While traditional models of sensory-motor alignment have centered on the mapping between static spatial features, such as stimulus location and movement endpoints, I will show that sensorimotor alignment emerges primarily in the kinetic domain. I will show the existence of an alignment in vectorial space between the encoded sensory flow and movement vectors rather than between visual receptive fields and movement endpoints as previously hypothesized. I will show that a neural network built on these connectivity premises can support key aspects of the superior colliculus function, namely visual grasping and target tracking. Overall, these findings reveal a novel dimension of sensory-motor alignment. By extending the concept of spatial-motor alignment from the static to the kinetic domain, it provides a novel conceptual framework to understand the origin of sensory-motor convergence and its relevance in guiding sensory-guided goal-directed behaviour
