Topic: primary motor cortex (M1)

The sensorimotor cortex plays a fundamental role for animals and humans to navigate and act in complex environments. In conventional experimental approaches animals perform highly trained tasks in a trial-repetitive manner with their movements limited to ensure reproducibility of the same or similar trial conditions. These conditions limit the study of ecologically relevant foraging behavior, particularly those involving full-body movements. However, recording from freely moving animals poses significant challenges for computational analysis due to the uniqueness of each trial and the complex

Prompt execution of planned motor action is context-dependent and a critical component of animal behavior. Studies from humans, non-human primates, and rodents have ubiquitously established that the primary motor cortex (M1) is the main hub for skilled motor learning, which relies on the precise coordination of multiple brain regions. Yet, how various populations of neurons separated by millimeters reliably communicate is still unclear. Here, we investigate how moment-to-moment and trial-to-trial fluctuations of population dynamics in the secondary (M2) motor cortex relate to stable population

Spontaneous, naturalistic behaviors comprise most of an animal’s lifetime. However, understanding how the brain encodes complex naturalistic behavior remains a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Decades of research has shown that performance on overtrained, task-based, goal-oriented behaviors can be decoded from neural activity recorded in areas of the corticostriatal axis, namely primary motor cortex (M1) and dorsal striatum (DS). More recently, single-unit responses during the execution of trained behaviors were found to be stable over a timescale of weeks in M1. However, it is currently

Excitatory and Inhibitory indexes measured by Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) allow the investigation of neuronal transmission and plasticity of the primary motor cortex (M1). Various forms of local GABAergic activity in the human M1 can be examined using paired-pulse paradigms (Sasaki et al., 2021). Intracortical facilitation (ICF), a glutamate-mediated excitatory index, is contrasted with short-interval intracortical inhibition (SICI), an inhibitory index dependent on the GABAergic system (Rotenberg et al., 2014). Mirror neurons, which fire both during action observation and executio