From Neurons to Cognition: Technologies for Precise Recording of Neural Activity Underlying Behavior

Understanding how brain activity encodes information and controls behavior is a long-standing question in neuroscience. This complex problem requires converging efforts from neuroscience and engineering, including technological solutions to perform high-precision and large-scale recordings of neuronal activity in vivo as well as unbiased methods to reliably measure and quantify behavior. Thanks to advances in genetics, molecular biology, engineering, and neuroscience, in recent decades, a variety of optical imaging and electrophysiological approaches for recording neuronal activity in awake animals have been developed and widely applied in the field. Moreover, sophisticated computer vision and machine learning algorithms have been developed to analyze animal behavior. In this review, we provide an overview of the current state of technology for neuronal recordings with a focus on optical and electrophysiological methods in rodents. In addition, we discuss areas that future technological development will need to cover in order to further our understanding of the neural activity underlying behavior.