Thesis defense Zhengyu Tang (Donders Series 603)

13 March 2023

Promotor: prof. dr. Tansu Celikel
Copromotor: dr. Fleur Zeldenrust

Deconstructing the Sense of Touch: The Role of Monoamines in Sensorimotor Control

The brain continually integrates the sensory information collected through sensory receptors in the periphery with internally generated information to predict the future. The main purpose of this inference process is to control the motor position of the body and appendages to proact and react to the ever-changing world around us.
Even though the integration of the bottom-up, i.e. the information about the current state of the world that originates from the sensory periphery, and top-down, i.e. internally generated information about the expectations, prior experiences, and task/context-related affordances, knowledge is a continuous process, the positional motor control of the body happens discontinuously in time and a goal-specific manner. Therefore these three processes are often studied in isolation. The goal of this thesis was to start unraveling the interaction across the three processes in the context of tactile object localization in the mouse whisker system.