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Poster E in Poster Session E: Thursday, August 6, 10:30 am – 12:15 pm, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

A parametric guidance law model of hunting in mice

Daniel Pollak¹, Jasmine Wang², Ha Dong³, Alexa Rios⁴, Xing Hao Li¹, Elena Zhong², Markus Meister¹; ¹California Institute of Technology, ²Caltech, ³Amherst College, ⁴University of California, Riverside

Presenter: Daniel Pollak

Mice rely on eating highly motile insects in the wild. Despite extensive work on hunting in mice, a basic description of hunting pursuit has not been made. Here we describe hunting pursuit as a parametric guidance law model, and relate this guidance law to multiunit brain activity. We found that of two common guidance laws, parallel navigation and proportional pursuit, parallel navigation better fit the behavior, though the difference was not statistically significant. How mice implement such a strategy necessitated an investigation into how behavioral variables relevant to hunting were represented in the brain. We investigated the superior colliculus (SC) due to its dual role as sensory and motor region. We found rich representations of the hunt in SC through multilayer Neuropixel probe recordings. Linear decoding yielded accurate reconstructions of such variables as distance, ground speed and turning speed in a state-dependent manner. These results indicate SC as a promising avenue for understanding complex and naturalistic sensorimotor behaviors such as hunting, and that there are state-dependent representational shifts in SC.

Topic Area: Methods, Tools, Theory & Neural Coding