TY - JOUR T1 - Emergence of an adaptive command for orienting behavior in premotor brainstem neurons of barn owls JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/119180 SP - 119180 AU - Fanny Cazettes AU - Brian J. Fischer AU - Michael V. Beckert AU - Jose L. Pena Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/03/22/119180.abstract N2 - The brain can be viewed as a probabilistic estimator, where sensory statistics bias judgments. Owls underestimate the direction of peripheral sound sources. This bias for central locations was proposed to reflect the increased uncertainty about eccentric direction. Understanding the neural pathway supporting this behavior provides a means to address how adaptive motor commands are implemented by neurons. Here we find that the sensory evidence about sound direction is weighted by its reliability in premotor neurons of the owl’s midbrain tegmentum such that the mean firing rate approximates the head-orienting bias. We demonstrate that this coding emerges through convergence of upstream projections from a map of space. We further show that manipulating the sensory input yields changes predicted by statistical inference in both premotor responses and behavioral bias. This work demonstrates how a topographic sensory representation can be linearly read out to adjust behavioral responses by statistics of the sensory input. ER -