# Neural Mechanisms of miss- and touch-guided sensorimotor corrections

> **NIH NIH R01** · CORNELL UNIVERSITY · 2024 · $522,855

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
When you reach for an apple and miss, you immediately make corrective submovements to make contact. And
after contact, precise touches at your fingers reshape your grasp. Unknowingly, our tongues move with similar
sophistication during speech and as we use the tongue’s sense of touch to handle, chew, and swallow food.
Tongue discoordination in systemic neurological diseases results in aspiration pneumonia, a leading cause of
death in Parkinson’s and ALS. But because tongue movements are extremely fast and hard to measure, neural
mechanisms of tongue control have been understudied. Here we combine high speed videography and deep
learning guided segmentation to quantify tongue kinematics with millisecond timescale precision. Next we
develop new behavioral paradigms inspired by primate target-jump reach-and-grasp tasks (Aim 1). As with the
primate limb, when the mouse tongue undershoots an unexpectedly withdrawn target (water spout), it
immediately produces corrective submovements to make contact. And as with a grasping hand, when the
mouse nicks a moved spout with the left or right side of its tongue, it immediately redirects the lick left or right
for better contact. To identify signals and circuits underlying these corrections, we combine brainwide neural
recording and manipulation (Aim 2). So far, neural recordings identify representations of misses, nicks, and
aimed corrections in single neurons and neural population dynamics in multiple brain regions. Miss-guided
corrections are impaired by both cortical and cerebellar inactivations. But mechanisms of touch-guided
corrections are fundamentally different. The ability to re-steer a tongue after a nick is impaired by inactivation
of superior colliculus, but not tongue-jaw sensory cortex (TJS1), tongue jaw motor cortex (TJM1), orofacial
premotor cortex (ALM), or a lick-associated region of cerebellum (fastigial nucleus). This double dissociation
suggests that touch-guided tongue steering may use midbrain pathways associated with visually-guided
orienting. To test this idea (Aim 3), we combine neural tracing, tongue surface receptive field mapping, and
optical microstimulation across precise locations of the colliculus. Our pilot data support the existence of a
topographically ordered tongue touch-to-tongue steering map on the surface of the colliculus which essentially
re-purposes both the logic and the layout of more commonly studied visually-guided saccades. In sum, our
goals are twofold: First our proposed research will finally clarify which aspects of the extended motor system
are important for which aspects of sensorimotor tongue control. Second, by comparing our findings to what’s
known sensorimotor processes underlying reaching and orienting, we aim to distinguish idiosyncratic solutions
to narrower sensorimotor control problems from general principles that hold across effectors and species.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10942766
- **Project number:** 1R01NS138093-01
- **Recipient organization:** CORNELL UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Jesse Heymann Goldberg
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $522,855
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-08-15 → 2029-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10942766

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10942766, Neural Mechanisms of miss- and touch-guided sensorimotor corrections (1R01NS138093-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-12 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10942766. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*