Mapping neural representations in motor cortex across time and space

As part of the ongoing Student/Postdoc-Run Speaker Series (SPRSS), and on behalf of the Circuits Club Group, Prof. Amy Orsborn from the University of Washington will give a talk titled "Mapping neural representations in motor cortex across time and space."

Abstract: Neural population decoding in motor areas has simultaneously advanced our understanding of how neurons coordinate to control behavior and improved brain-computer interface (BCI) therapies for people with paralysis. Most existing studies examine neural representations in well-learned motor behaviors and in neural population activity sampled across relatively small portions of frontal motor cortices. In this talk, I'll first briefly present work that leverages BCIs to precisely define the relationship between neural activity and behavior, and then study how neural representations evolve over time during learning. Our results highlight that motor skill learning shapes the recruitment of individual neurons or neural populations, and that this process is influenced by the BCI algorithms. I will then present new work mapping neural representations of well-learned behaviors across locations in motor cortices using Neuropixels. Our results suggest motor cortices have highly heterogeneous representations when viewed both at the single neuron and population levels, which may help resolve seeming contradictions across a long history of research mapping motor cortices.