Tudor Dragoi

10/ Many thanks to the whole team (Zachary Loschinskey,
Munib Hasnain, @briandepasquale.bsky.social, @mikeeconomo.bsky.social) who made this work possible!

9/ Takeaway: Together these results point to a previously unrecognized, fast timescale layer of flexibility in motor control and provide a framework for tracking how cortical circuits dynamically govern behavior as demands evolve.

8/ Takeaway: When future actions and/or their sensory consequences are unpredictable, the cortex stays engaged to monitor and guide movement. We describe how this may represent an instantiation of a sensorimotor form of attention.

7/ During learning, engagement is initially prolonged under high uncertainty and sharpens into transient engagement as animals learn how a task is structured and uncertainty falls.

6/ Using a task in which animals are rewarded optogenetically, we demonstrate that engagement does not reflect a motivated or reward related state – but is sensitive to sensorimotor uncertainty specifically.

5/ Crucially, whether engagement persists depends on the contextual demands of the movement: cortical engagement is sustained when animals are uncertain about upcoming events, such as the delivery of a reward, and it dissipates when outcomes become predictable.

4/ When the motor cortex is engaged, population spike rates are elevated and necessary for initiating and precisely controlling movement kinematics. Remarkably, the cortex can rapidly disengage on sub-second timescales even as movement continues in a smooth, uninterrupted manner.

3/ Using multi-site population recordings, optogenetics, statistical modeling of neural state transitions, and tightly controlled behavioral tasks, we found that cortical control can switch between “engaged” and “disengaged” states during a single continuous movement.

2/ Further, it’s unclear whether cortical involvement is fixed during movement or can toggle on and off within an action.

1/ Many studies have shown that the motor cortex can be essential for some movements but dispensable for others, and its role can change with learning. As a result, when exactly the motor cortex contributes to movement has been difficult to predict, control, and formalize.

Dynamic engagement of the motor cortex in controlling movement Neural circuits do not contribute equally or continuously to behavior. In mice, the motor cortex can be essential or dispensable for movement in different contexts, but how it is dynamically recruited...

Very excited to share a new preprint - my first paper in the @mikeeconomo.bsky.social lab where we asked when and why the motor cortex is recruited for movement control:🧠👇https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.13.699314v1