Speakers > Fanny Cazettes

Fanny Cazette

Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone, Marseille, France CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille, France

Fanny Cazette was trained as a biomedical engineer in Paris before earning a PhD in Neuroscience at Albert Einstein in New York. In 2016, she moved to Lisbon for her postdoc in the lab of Zach Mainen at Champalimaud, and became a member of the International Brain Laboratory. She recently joined the INT in Marseille as a CNRS researcher. Her research focuses on the neural systems and computations underlying flexible decision-making in mice.

Facial expressions and their neural correlates reveal a reservoir of decision variables in the mouse frontal cortex.

In any given situation, the environment can be parsed in different ways to define useful decision variables for any task, but the way in which this manifold of potential decision strategies is processed to shape behavior is not well understood. We have explored this question by monitoring behavior and recording large neural ensembles in the frontal cortex of mice trained to perform a foraging task that admits several possible strategies for deciding when to leave a resource site. Surprisingly, we found that, regardless of the decision variable best explaining the foraging behavior of each mouse, activity in the frontal cortex reflects a full basis set of computations spanning a repertoire of decision variables extending beyond those useful for the present task. Given the recent discovery that cortical activity patterns accurately reflect facial movement, we next explored the relationship between facial movement and the computations necessary to solve our task. Our analysis revealed that the reservoir of latent computations could be read out from high dimensional movements extracted from videos of the face. Optogenetic manipulations showed that the frontal cortex is needed for generating the facial expressions of decision variables. This tight coupling between brain and body suggests that characterization of rich multidimensional movements can offer a window into multiplexed neural computations used to form decisions.