Motor cortex signals for each arm are mixed across hemispheres and neurons yet partitioned within the population response
By K. C. Ames, Mark M. Churchland. 2019
112 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Motor cortex (M1) has lateralized outputs, yet neurons can be active during movements of either arm. What is the nature and role of activity across the two hemispheres? We recorded muscles and neurons bilaterally while monkeys cycled with each arm. Most neurons were active during movement of either arm. Responses were strongly arm-dependent, raising two possibilities. First, population-level signals might differ depending on the arm used. Second, the same population-level signals might be present, but distributed differently across neurons. The data supported this second hypothesis. Muscle activity was accurately predicted by activity in either the ipsilateral or contralateral hemisphere. More generally, we failed to find signals unique to the contralateral hemisphere. Yet if signals are shared across hemispheres, how do they avoid impacting the wrong arm? We found that activity related to each arm occupies a distinct subspace, enabling muscle-activity decoders to naturally ignore signals related to the other arm.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Biomedical Engineering
In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Krishna V. Shenoy
- Saurabh Vyas
- Matthew D. Golub
- David Sussillo
- John P. Cunningham
- Xiao-Jing Wang
- Guangyu Robert Yang
- Rafael Yuste
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Natural continual learning: success is a journey, not (just) a destination (2021, neutral): “This is consistent with experimental findings that neural dynamics often occupy orthogonal subspaces across contexts in biological circuits (Kaufman et al., 2014; Ames and Churchland, 2019; Failor et al., 2021; Jensen et al., 2021b).”
- Computation Through Neural Population Dynamics (2020, background): “During this task, neural measurements are typically made in contralateral-to-arm primary motor (M1) and dorsal premotor cortex (PMd), though comparisons between ipsilateral and contralateral regions have also been investigated (Ames & Churchland 2019, Cisek et al. 2003).”