Neuroclub 2025 Seminar 6

Supported by the British Neuroscience Association

Alongside pizzas, this week we have an alumnus visiting from the University of St Andrews:

Pierce Mullen: "Decoding Prediction Errors in the Inferior Olive: Evidence from Zebrafish"

Internal models are key to sensorimotor control, allowing the brain to predict the sensory consequences of movement. When reality deviates from these predictions, the resulting error signals drive adaptation. The inferior olive (IO) has long been implicated in this process, but whether it computes or simply relays prediction errors remains debated. In this talk, I’ll present two-photon calcium imaging data from zebrafish during visually guided motor adaptation. We show that IO neurons encode mismatches between expected and actual visual feedback, consistent with a role in signalling prediction errors. However, recent glutamate sensor imaging suggests that this comparison may occur upstream of the IO, implying the IO may transform or gate precomputed errors rather than generate them directly. These findings refine our understanding of how the brain implements internal model-based correction during movement. I'll also share some work using graph-convolutional networks to streamline animal behaviour analysis across a range of species and contexts, which may be of interest to colleagues studying the neural control of behaviour.