Cortical population activity within a preserved neural manifold underlies multiple motor behaviors

By Juan Alvaro Gallego, M. Perich, Stephanie N. Naufel, C. Ethier, Sara A. Solla, Lee E. Miller. Nature Communications, 2018

311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Populations of cortical neurons flexibly perform different functions; for the primary motor cortex (M1) this means a rich repertoire of motor behaviors. We investigate the flexibility of M1 movement control by analyzing neural population activity during a variety of skilled wrist and reach-to-grasp tasks. We compare across tasks the neural modes that capture dominant neural covariance patterns during each task. While each task requires different patterns of muscle and single unit activity, we find unexpected similarities at the neural population level: the structure and activity of the neural modes is largely preserved across tasks. Furthermore, we find two sets of neural modes with task-independent activity that capture, respectively, generic temporal features of the set of tasks and a task-independent mapping onto muscle activity. This system of flexibly combined, well-preserved neural modes may underlie the ability of M1 to learn and generate a wide-ranging behavioral repertoire. Motor cortical neurons enable performance of a wide range of movements. Here, the authors report that dominant population activity patterns, the neural modes, are largely preserved across various tasks, with many displaying consistent temporal dynamics and reliably mapping onto muscle activity.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e405b0d8788932e3794966bd4f869d12173497ff

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Computation Through Neural Population Dynamics (2020, background): “…2018), how activity from one brain region affects another (e.g., Semedo et al. 2019), or how population covariance structure changes across tasks (e.g.,Gallego et al. 2018), further headway will likely require recording neural activity from many more of the brain regions involved in a given task.”
Attractor and integrator networks in the brain (2021, background): “Motor cortical trajectories Finally, recordings of motor cortical activity during stereotyped primate arm movements reveal the existence of stable low-dimensional trajectories [84, 222, 223, 224, 225], similar to the trajectories in state space originally characterized in olfactory circuit responses”
Long-term stability of cortical population dynamics underlying consistent behavior (2020, unknown): “The dimensionality of the manifold for each brain region (M1: 10; PMd: 15; S1: 8) was selected based on previous studies 5,22 .”