Speed Control in the Primary Motor Cortex

COMPUTATIONAL PRINCIPLES UNDERLYING SPEED CONTROL IN THE PRIMARY MOTOR CORTEX How do we make the same movement but faster? Getting a clear answer to this question will help us design neuroprosthetic devices that can flexibly generate movements at different speeds. In a collaboration with Mark Churchland, we trained recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to directly generate the muscle activity during cycling movements at different speeds (experimental data collected in Mark Churchland’s laboratory). Surprisingly, we find that the networks made qualitative and quantitative predictions for the neural activity in the primary motor cortex of non-human macaques. We examine differences in the dynamics displayed by neural and muscle signals during movement at different speeds, using both computational and theoretical models.

Saxena S.*, Russo A.*, Cunningham J., Churchland M. “Network principles predict motor cortex population activity across movement speeds” eLife, 2022.