Gabriel Rojas-Bowe

We often treat sensory processing as if it can be studied separately from the movements animals make while gathering information and making decisions. However, in natural behavior, visual input, movement, and internal state are tightly linked. My research asks how body movements modulate activity in the primary visual cortex (V1) while freely moving mice perform visual decision-making tasks.

To address this question, I combine large-scale Neuropixels recordings with behavioral analysis and neural modeling. I study how locomotion and task-independent movements relate to sensory encoding, population variability, and engagement during goal-directed behavior. Ultimately, this work aims to clarify how the brain integrates sensory input with the ongoing movements and state changes that structure natural behavior.