A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience
• Systems Neuroscience

Background:

• Understanding how diverse brain regions integrate sensory information with expectations for movement and decision-making is a significant challenge.
• Inconsistent analytical approaches across different laboratories hinder progress in neuroscience research.
• A unified, large-scale dataset is needed to map brain-wide neural activity and its relation to behavior.

Purpose of the Study:

• To create a comprehensive brain-wide neural activity map using large-scale recordings.
• To analyze how neural activity in various brain regions encodes task variables during a decision-making task.
• To provide a publicly accessible resource for understanding brain computations and behavior.

Main Methods:

• Acquired large-scale neural recordings from 621,733 neurons using 699 Neuropixels probes across 139 mice in 12 laboratories.
• Data collected from mice performing a complex decision-making task involving sensory, motor, and cognitive processes.
• Probes covered 279 brain areas in the forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain, and cerebellum.

Main Results:

• Visual stimulus representations initially appeared in visual areas and subsequently spread to midbrain and hindbrain regions, encoding choices.
• Widespread neural responses correlated with impending motor actions across nearly all recorded brain areas.
• Neural responses to reward delivery and consumption were observed throughout the brain, indicating distributed processing.

Conclusions:

• The study provides a valuable brain-wide map and analysis of neural activity during decision-making.
• Neural computations related to sensory processing, choice, action, and reward are distributed across multiple brain areas.
• This publicly available dataset serves as a crucial resource for future neuroscience research into brain function and behavior.