Topic: cross-decoding

Population recording offer a window into the underlying dynamics of brain regions. Latent Variable Models (LVMs) infer these dynamics treating the observations as projections from the latents. Evaluating the quality of these models remains challenging, as we don't have access to the true underlying dynamics. A common approach, "co-smoothing", involves jointly estimating latent variables from neural data and predicting the firing rates of held-out neurons. However, we find that optimizing this single objective often yields models that include extraneous dynamics not relevant to the underlying n

Beta rhythms are ubiquitous in the motor cortex, and many functional roles were proposed. We recently described a double-dissociation between different beta bands in macaques local field potential (LFP), with low beta (<20Hz) originating in primary motor cortex (M1) and correlating with movement preparation and spontaneous postural dynamics, and high beta (>20Hz) originating in dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) and reflecting spatiotemporal attention (Nougaret et al. 2023, doi:10.1101/2023.03.28.534535). Even within these two bands, individual beta events are highly heterogeneous in their tem