A novel behavioral paradigm using mice to study predictive postural control.

The ability to anticipate disturbances and adjust one's posture accordingly-known as "predictive postural control"-is crucial for preventing falls and for advancing robotics. Human postural studies often face limitations with measurement tools and sample sizes, hindering insight into underlying neural mechanisms. To address these limitations, we developed a postural perturbation task for freely moving mice, modeled after those used in human studies. Using a dynamic platform, we delivered reproducible perturbations with or without preceding auditory cues and quantified how the auditory cue affects postural responses to perturbations. Our work provides validation of a new postural control model, which opens the door to the types of neural population recordings and circuit manipulation that are currently possible only in mice.