Causal information transmission in locomotion – LOCONNECT

Life-threatening cues such as a sting in the foot cause immediate avoidance behavior. In that moment, the prompt integration of sensory inputs by motor centers can become a matter of life and death. A major challenge in neuroscience is to understand how information flows in the brainstem during such integrative reflexive behaviors by assessing the direction of neuronal communication or causality. Although correlation analysis of neural activity signals is widely used to estimate functional connectivity, this method lacks causality information underlying the direction of information flow. LOCONNECT will build a framework for understanding how sensorimotor integration is achieved by combining optical recordings of intracellular calcium dynamics from spatially distributed command neurons in the brainstem (Wyart group at the Paris Brain Institute) with a theoretical framework that identifies causality (Mora group at the Ecole Normale Supérieure).