Daily we use purposeful, voluntary movements to interact with our environment.
These movements demand and cause our body to experience a weight
redistribution, i.e., anticipatory postural adjustments (APAs), and it’s the appropriate
employment of these APAs that allows us to complete said voluntary movements
without falling over or losing our equilibrium. The literature suggests that for humans,
monkeys, and several quadrupeds, APAs are crucial at initiation and during
movement. However, research has been somewhat limited due to the lack of
behavioural paradigms that would allow for a better understanding into the neural
circuitry involved with APAs. Given the widespread availability of genetic tools and
advanced viral techniques in mice I focused my efforts in developing a novel
behavioral paradigm for this species. The first chapters detail the reasoning behind
the development of this novel behavioural paradigm while also providing a complete
description of the different components and their functions. Later chapters use the
custom-designed setup to characterise mouse APAs, incorporating various recording
approaches designed to quantify APAs and compare them to those described in
prior work, highlighting possible interspecifies similarities and differences.
Additionally, I briefly discuss the potential neural circuitry of APAs informed by my
own data and research that has been done in different animals, providing a
comprehensive overview of APAs in mice.