Primary motor cortex underlies multi-joint integration for fast feedback control
By J. Pruszynski, I. Kurtzer, Joseph Y. Nashed, Mohsen Omrani, B. Brouwer, Stephen H. Scott, Botterell Hall. Nature, 2011
350 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A basic difficulty for the nervous system is integrating locally ambiguous sensory information to form accurate perceptions about the outside world. This local-to-global problem is also fundamental to motor control of the arm, because complex mechanical interactions between shoulder and elbow allow a particular amount of motion at one joint to arise from an infinite combination of shoulder and elbow torques. Here we show, in humans and rhesus monkeys, that a transcortical pathway through primary motor cortex (M1) resolves this ambiguity during fast feedback control. We demonstrate that single M1 neurons of behaving monkeys can integrate shoulder and elbow motion information into motor commands that appropriately counter the underlying torque within about 50 milliseconds of a mechanical perturbation. Moreover, we reveal a causal link between M1 processing and multi-joint integration in humans by showing that shoulder muscle responses occurring ∼50 milliseconds after pure elbow displacement can be potentiated by transcranial magnetic stimulation. Taken together, our results show that transcortical processing through M1 permits feedback responses to express a level of sophistication that rivals voluntary control; this provides neurophysiological support for influential theories positing that voluntary movement is generated by the intelligent manipulation of sensory feedback.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2dee31a4de84e742f57fdd7d134ad28ddb6249b
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Citations in the corpus
- Computational mechanisms of sensorimotor control. (2011, neutral): “Recent studies using single-cell recordings in monkeys and TMS in humans have shown that these task-dependent feedback gains are dependent on primary motor cortex (Kimura et al., 2006; Pruszynski et al., 2011; Shemmell et al., 2009).”
- Flexible sensorimotor computations through rapid reconfiguration of cortical dynamics (2018, neutral): “For example, neural activity during a reaching movement is likely governed by both local recurrent interactions and distal inputs from time-varying and condition-dependent reafferent signals (Todorov and Jordan, 2002; Scott, 2004; Pruszynski et al., 2011).”
- Common muscle synergies for balance and walking (2013, background): “, 2010; Pruszynski and Scott, 2012) and are influenced by cortical contributions (Evarts and Tanji, 1976; Cheney and Fetz, 1984; Taube et al., 2006; Pruszynski et al., 2011).”