Frédéric Gambino winner of a ERC consolidator

Winner of an ERC starting grant in 2016 with the NEUROGOAL project, Frédéric Gambino has just been awarded an ERC consolidator with the MOTORHEAD project. Congratulations!

About the project

MOTORHEAD – “Higher-order motor control of stochastic behavior in an uncertain environment”

“Decision-making often occurs in the absence of clear instruction to guide action. Instead, theories and experiments have predicted that the brain must compute a decision-value based on past experience to select the best action. This implies that the action with the highest subjective value should always be chosen. However, behavior is often stochastic with variability from trial-to-trial. To resolve this long-standing paradox, our project MOTORHEAD will take full advantage of state-of-the-art in vivo neuronal recordings and computational methods in behaving rodent to bridge for the first time the gap between deterministic decision-signal and stochastic motor commands, achieving thus an unprecedented level of understanding of these “unpredictable” behaviors. Indeed, despite decade of intensive work, key questions remain unexplored: i) How such a deterministic decision signal is maintained without necessarily causing movement? ii) And how it is then converted to a final motor command with trial-by-trial variability? To achieve this breakthrough, we propose an ambitious system neuroscience approach, at high spatial and temporal resolution, to illuminate for the first time the cellular principles underlying the control and transformation of decision variable.”