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The Journal of Neuroscience, May 9, 2007, 27(19):5105-5114; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3570-06.2007

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Encoding of Movement Fragments in the Motor Cortex

Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos,¹ Qingqing Xu,² and Yali Amit²

¹Departments of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and ²Statistics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637

Correspondence should be addressed to Nicholas Hatsopoulos, Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637. Email: nicho{at}uchicago.edu

Previous studies have suggested that complex movements can be elicited by electrical stimulation of the motor cortex. Most recording studies in the motor cortex, however, have investigated the encoding of time-independent features of movement such as direction, velocity, position, or force. Here, we show that single motor cortical neurons encode temporally evolving movement trajectories and not simply instantaneous movement parameters. We explicitly characterize the preferred trajectories of individual neurons using a simple exponential encoding model and demonstrate that temporally extended trajectories not only capture the tuning of motor cortical neurons more accurately, but can be used to decode the instantaneous movement direction with less error. These findings suggest that single motor cortical neurons encode whole movement fragments, which are temporally extensive and can be quite complex.

Key words: motor cortex; preferred direction; encoding; decoding; trajectory; regression

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Received Aug. 17, 2006; revised March 29, 2007; accepted April 2, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to Nicholas Hatsopoulos, Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637. Email: nicho{at}uchicago.edu

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Temporal Encoding of Movement in Motor Cortical Neurons

J. Andrew Pruszynski, Angela M. Coderre, Timothy P. Lillicrap, and Isaac Kurtzer
J. Neurosci. 2007 27: 10076-10077. [Full Text]  

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