Peters Group

We study how activity in the cortex-basal ganglia-thalamus circuit is used to learn and drive behaviour.

The brain exists to facilitate interaction with the world. A critical part of this function, which mammals are particularly good at, is learning when and how to move. Our lab is interested in understanding the neural activity underlying this process. Specifically, we focus on the cortex-basal ganglia-thalamus circuit, and investigate how these structures work together to learn and execute behaviour.

Our research combines simple learned behaviours in mice with the full modern toolbox of systems neuroscience to record and manipulate activity. This lets us investigate fundamental questions in new ways: How does the activity of large neuronal populations relate to movement? How does activity flow between brain regions? How does activity change with learning? What activity in which regions are key for learning and driving behaviour? Our goal is to use this approach to uncover functional principles of the cortex-basal ganglia-thalamus circuit.