Behavior is complex, and at any given moment, animals and humans integrate information across a wide variety of sensory modalities and internal neural computations. This project will aim to understand how these distinct streams of information flexibly interact with each other while an organism engages in complex behaviors. We will use large-scale electrophysiology to monitor the activity of individual neurons and field potential oscillations in specific brain regions, combine these with high-resolution video monitoring, and use advanced computational methods to infer the limits and dynamics of the interactions between cognitive and motor variables.

Aging is associated with an increased risk of developing both cognitive difficulties and gait abnormalities. In previous work with Frank lab, we discovered a precisely timed synchronization between hippocampal spatial representations and footfalls of rats as they approached upcoming spatial decisions. These results demonstrate the existence of a previously unknown coupling between central cognitive representations and peripheral motor processes that synchronize the two on a timescale of tens of milliseconds. Does the coupling between internal cognitive representations and ongoing locomotor processes break down with aging? Can we use the degree of representation-step synchronization as a biomarker of coherent brain function and intervene early to promote healthy aging? We will study neural computations, behavioral performance, and gait in animals as they age to uncover the fundamental interactions between cognition and action during healthy aging.

Disruption experiments provide essential tools to determine causality in systems neuroscience. We will use closed-loop optogenetics to uncover crucial nodes in the nervous system that enable the flexible binding of cross-modality and cross-region synchronization at fast timescales during behavior. These disruption experiments will also be accompanied by behavioral manipulations.