A collicular map for touch-guided tongue control

Accurate goal-directed behaviour requires the sense of touch to be integrated with information about body position and ongoing motion1,2. Behaviours such as chewing, swallowing and speech critically depend on precise tactile events on a rapidly moving tongue3, but neural circuits for dynamic touch-guided tongue control are unknown. Here, using high-speed videography, we examined three-dimensional lingual kinematics as mice drank from a water spout that unexpectedly changed position during licking, requiring re-aiming in response to subtle contact events on the left, centre or right surface of the tongue. Mice integrated information about both precise touch events and tongue position to re-aim ensuing licks. Touch-guided re-aiming was unaffected by photoinactivation of tongue sensory, premotor and motor cortices, but was impaired by photoinactivation of the lateral superior colliculus (latSC). Electrophysiological recordings identified latSC neurons with mechanosensory receptive fields for precise touch events that were anchored in tongue-centred, head-centred or conjunctive reference frames. Notably, latSC neurons also encoded tongue position before contact, information that is important for tongue-to-head-based coordinate transformations underlying accurate touch-guided aiming. Viral tracing revealed tongue sensory inputs to the latSC from the lingual trigeminal nucleus, and optical microstimulation in the latSC revealed a topographic map for aiming licks. These findings demonstrate that touch-guided tongue control relies on a collicular mechanosensorimotor map, analogous to collicular visuomotor maps associated with visually guided orienting across many species.