Topic: movement kinematics

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

The brain’s ability to flexibly chain elementary movements into sequences enables rich behavior. For example, a concert pianist can play a never-before-seen sonata from the sheet music. However, to achieve the fluid and error-free performance required for a concert, she extensively practices a single piece until it is automatic. The neural circuits underlying automatic motor sequences are thought to differ from those for executing flexible ones, but the distinction is poorly understood. To address this, we trained rats to execute sequences of three lever presses in flexible sessions – where cu

We can perform a diverse range of innate and learned behaviors – from running and jumping to a swift tennis serve – with remarkable coordination and grace. While skillful execution of innate and learned behaviors is supported by sensorimotor striatum, how this region encodes behavior remains poorly understood. Studies based on learned skills suggest striatal neurons represent skills as neural sequences, with each neuron locked to a feature of the stereotyped motor output. However, whether this coding scheme generalizes to innate behaviors or emerges through learning is not known. One possibili

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