Kavli Affiliate: Noelle L’Etoile and Saul Kato
| Authors: Raymond L Dunn, Caitriona Costello, Jackson M Borchardt, Daniel Yutaka Sprague, Grace C Chiu, Julia M Miller, Noelle L’Etoile and Saul Kato
| Summary:
We report the existence of a working memory system in the nematode C. elegans that is employed for deferred action in a sensory-guided decision-making process. We find that the turn direction of discrete reorientations during navigation is under sensory-guided control and relies on a working memory that can persist over an intervening behavioral sequence. This memory system is implemented by the phasic interaction of two distributed oscillatory dynamical components. The interaction of oscillatory neural ensembles may be a conserved primitive of cognition across the animal kingdom.