Ground tilt representation in the rodent cerebral cortex

Abstract

Information about ground tilt at ones location is indispensable for integrating the body with its surrounding environment. However, how ground-tilt information, together with movement and posture information, is represented in the cerebral cortex remains unclear. To address this issue, we developed a new six-degree-of-freedom platform that can rapidly and precisely impart ground motion to head-fixed mice. Using the Diesel2p large field-of-view two-photon mesoscope, we performed calcium imaging to simultaneously capture activity dynamics across broad cortical areas from the frontal to the parietal cortex while driving the platform through various motion patterns. We found a core area for the ground-tilt information at the parietal cortex, although tilt-direction neurons were found across the dorsal cortex. Neuronal populations preserved tilt-direction information within a common low-dimensional manifold across three distinct motion conditions, indicating a condition-invariant tilt code. Furthermore, to investigate shared dynamics across multiple cortical areas, we introduced broadcast- subspace analysis as an extension of communication subspace analysis. This extended framework revealed that tilt information occupied the second principal shared axis, following movement information. These results reveal the core cortical area for processing tilt information, its universal format, and its sharing across the dorsal cortex, thereby providing a framework for cortical information processing that integrates movement, posture, and environment.