Low-dimensional and monotonic preparatory activity in mouse anterior lateral motor cortex

Neurons in multiple brain regions fire trains of action potentials anticipating specific movements, but this ‘preparatory activity’ has rarely been compared across behavioral tasks in the same brain region. We compared preparatory activity in auditory and tactile delayed-response tasks, with directional licking as the output. The anterior lateral motor cortex (ALM) is necessary for motor planning in both tasks. Multiple features of ALM preparatory activity during the delay epoch were similar across tasks. First, majority of neurons showed direction-selective activity and spatially intermingled neurons were selective for either movement direction. Second, many cells showed mixed coding of sensory stimulus and licking direction, with a bias toward licking direction. Third, delay activity was largely monotonic and low-dimensional. Fourth, pairs of neurons with similar direction selectivity showed high spike-count correlations. Our study forms the foundation to analyze the neural circuits underlying preparatory activity in a genetically tractable model organism.