Topic: motor cortices

Substantial progress towards understanding neural computation has been made by studying the dynamical systems that govern neural population activity. Because dynamical models make predictions about the temporal evolution of neural states, perturbations of neural activity are a powerful tool to evaluate and refine these models. Here, using electrodes and Neuropixels in the motor cortices of macaques engaged in a reaching task, we probed how local population dynamics are affected by two perturbation modalities: optogenetic excitation and electrical intracortical microstimulation (ICMS). Both st

Large-scale neuronal recordings have revealed that movement-related activity is distributed across the brain. Within motor cortices, such activity is constrained to latent dynamics on the population level. Whether other regions exhibit these motor cortical dynamics, and how this distributed activity relate to specific motor behavior remains unclear. We used multiple Neuropixels probes to simultaneously record population activity across cortical and subcortical regions during a goal-directed reaching task in mice. Task-related population activity followed dominant latent dynamics across all rec