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Population subspaces reflect movement intention for arm and brain-machine interface control

View ORCID ProfileH. Lalazar, View ORCID ProfileJ.M. Murray, L.F. Abbott, E. Vaadia
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/688259
H. Lalazar
1Zuckerman Mind, Brain and Behavior Institute, Columbia University, NY, 10032
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  • For correspondence: hagai.lalazar@gmail.com
J.M. Murray
1Zuckerman Mind, Brain and Behavior Institute, Columbia University, NY, 10032
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L.F. Abbott
1Zuckerman Mind, Brain and Behavior Institute, Columbia University, NY, 10032
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E. Vaadia
2Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, 91904
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Abstract

Motor cortex is active during covert motor acts, such as action observation and mental rehearsal, when muscles are quiescent. Such neuronal activity, which is thought to be similar to the activity underlying overt movement, is exploited by neural prosthetics to afford subjects control of an external effector. We compared neural activity in primary motor cortex of monkeys who controlled a cursor using either their arm or a brain-machine interface (BMI) to identify what features of neural activity are similar or dissimilar in these two control contexts. Neuronal population activity parcellates into orthogonal subspaces, with some representations that are unique to arm movements and others that are shared between arm and BMI control. The shared subspace is invariant to the effector used and to biomechanical details of the movement, revealing a representation that reflects movement intention. This intention representation is likely the signal extracted by BMI algorithms for cursor control, and subspace orthogonality accounts for how neurons involved in arm control can drive a BMI while the arm remains at rest. These results provide a resolution to the long-standing debate of whether motor cortex represents muscle activity or abstract movement variables, and it clarifies various puzzling aspects of neural prosthetic research.

Footnotes

  • We’d like to thank M. Shachar, Y. Moshe, S. Freeman, and A. Shapochnikov for technical assistance; H. Bergman and Z. Israel for help with the surgeries. This research was supported by BSF, ISF, NIH (MH093338) grants, an NSF NeuroNex Award (DBI-1707398), and contributions from The Rosetrees Trust and The Ida Baruch Fund, and the Swartz, Simons, and Gatsby Charitable Foundations.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted July 02, 2019.
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Population subspaces reflect movement intention for arm and brain-machine interface control
H. Lalazar, J.M. Murray, L.F. Abbott, E. Vaadia
bioRxiv 688259; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/688259
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Population subspaces reflect movement intention for arm and brain-machine interface control
H. Lalazar, J.M. Murray, L.F. Abbott, E. Vaadia
bioRxiv 688259; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/688259

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