Low-dimensional neural features reflect central features of muscle activation
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Any time we move, our brains solve the difficult problem of translating our motor intentions to muscle commands. Understanding how this computation takes place, and in particular, what role the motor cortex plays in movement generation, has been a central issue in systems neuroscience that remains unresolved. In this thesis, we took an unconventional approach to the analysis of cortical neural activity and its relationship to executed movements. We used dimensionality reduction to extract the salient patterns of neural population activity, and related those to the muscle activity patterns generated during arm reaches to a grid of targets. We found that salient neural activity patterns appeared to tightly reflect muscle activity patterns with a biologically-plausible lag. We also applied our analyses to movements that were planned before being executed, and found that a muscle-framework view of the cortical activity was consistent with previously-described predictions of movement kinematics based on the state of the cortical population activity. Overall, our results elucidate remarkable simplicity of the motor-cortical activity at the population level, despite the complexity and heterogeneity of individual cell's activities.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Rivera Alvidrez, Zuley |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering |
| Primary advisor | Shenoy, Krishna V. (Krishna Vaughn) |
| Thesis advisor | Shenoy, Krishna V. (Krishna Vaughn) |
| Thesis advisor | Newsome, William T |
| Thesis advisor | Ng, Andrew Y, 1976- |
| Advisor | Newsome, William T |
| Advisor | Ng, Andrew Y, 1976- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Zuley Rivera Alvidrez. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2011. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Zuley Rivera Alvidrez
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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