Lanzarini Francesca, Maranesi Monica, Rondoni Elena Hilary, Albertini Davide, Ferretti Elena, Lanzilotto Marco, Micera Silvestro, Mazzoni Alberto, Bonini Luca
Department of Medicine and Surgery, University of Parma, Parma, Italy.
The Biorobotics Institute, and Department of Excellence in AI and Robotics, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy.
Science. 2025 Jan 10;387(6730):214-220. doi: 10.1126/science.adq6510. Epub 2025 Jan 9.
The current understanding of primate natural action organization derives from laboratory experiments in restrained contexts (RCs) under the assumption that this knowledge generalizes to freely moving contexts (FMCs). In this work, we developed a neurobehavioral platform to enable wireless recording of the same premotor neurons in both RCs and FMCs. Neurons often encoded the same hand and mouth actions differently in RCs and FMCs. Furthermore, in FMCs, we identified cells that selectively encoded actions untestable during RCs and others that displayed mixed selectivity for multiple actions, which is compatible with an organization based on cortical motor synergies at different levels of complexity. Cross-context decoding demonstrated that neural activity in FMCs is richer and more generalizable than in RCs, which suggests that neuroethological approaches are better suited to unveil the neural bases of behavior.
目前对灵长类动物自然动作组织的理解源于在受限环境（RCs）下进行的实验室实验，其假设是这些知识可以推广到自由移动环境（FMCs）。在这项研究中，我们开发了一个神经行为平台，能够在RCs和FMCs中对相同的运动前神经元进行无线记录。神经元在RCs和FMCs中对相同的手部和口部动作的编码往往不同。此外，在FMCs中，我们识别出了在RCs期间无法测试的选择性编码动作的细胞，以及对多种动作表现出混合选择性的其他细胞，这与基于不同复杂程度的皮质运动协同作用的组织方式相一致。跨环境解码表明，FMCs中的神经活动比RCs中的更丰富、更具普遍性，这表明神经行为学方法更适合揭示行为的神经基础。
