Topic: area 2

Proprioception is fundamental for the control of movement, its loss producing profound motor deficits. Yet basic questions of how pose and movement are represented, as well as how these representations are arranged across the somatosensory cortex, are unclear. To this end, we adopt a task-driven modelling approach, using a spiking variational autoencoder to approximate a population of cortical neurons. We optimize the model to encode natural movement stimuli derived from recordings of human kinematics and impose biological constraints which we hypothesise to be important for reproducing charac

Constant interactions of motor and sensory signals occur at many levels in the nervous system to support animals’ adaptive behaviors. During movements, motor brain regions not only send motor commands to descending spinal pathways, but also corollary discharge (CD) signals to other brain areas to modulate sensory processing. Theoretical work suggests the sensory predictions conveyed by CD signals are combined with sensory feedback to form an optimal estimate of the body state. However, neural underpinnings of this integration in cortex remain elusive. Here, we used a neural decoding-based appr