Locomotor activity enhances environmental representation by boosting visuo-frontal communication

Locomotion in freely moving macaques enhances visuo-frontal communication, boosting visual-evoked responses and population coding accuracy in prefrontal neurons during and after movement.

• Why it matters: Rapid scene sampling during exploration must remain accurate despite oculomotor and motion-related disruptions, but compensatory mechanisms for downstream sensory transmission were unclear.
• What they did: The team recorded spiking in visual and prefrontal cortex while macaques explored freely or ran bipedally on a treadmill, tracking oculomotor events with wireless recordings. They also used electrical stimulation to test inter-areal synaptic efficacy.
• The result: Visuo-frontal communication increased during and after locomotion, improving prefrontal coding accuracy (not visual cortex) and enhancing visual detection performance after locomotion; stimulation showed elevated inter-areal synaptic efficacy during locomotor activity.

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