A novel behavioral paradigm for characterizing anticipatory postural adjustments in mice

A force-plate locomotion assay in freely moving mice reveals stereotyped anticipatory postural adjustments, with swing-forepaw unloading starting 87.9 ms before lift-off.

• Why it matters: Mice lack a tractable behavioral test for APAs, limiting genetic and circuit-level study of how the nervous system redistributes body weight before voluntary movement.
• What they did: Mice stood on four independent load cells, received an auditory GO cue, and initiated locomotion; force recordings, high-speed video, and markerless pose estimation quantified center-of-pressure shifts and unloading timing.
• The result: A single principal component captured ~80% of trial variance (vs ~50% with shuffled paw identity), and multimodal estimates placed earliest postural movement 160–180 ms before forepaw rotation, supporting PRN as a candidate node.

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