Neuroethology of natural actions in freely moving monkeys

Abstract

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.