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Download Re-examining the debate about the functional role of motor cortex
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Re-examining the debate about the functional role of motor cortex Robert Ajemian Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT It is now quite common knowledge that Georgopoulos' pioneering work on the tuning of motor cortical neurons to movement direction precipitated a protracted debate on the function of motor cortex. The success of the population vector approach led some to speculate that high level kinematic details of movement are represented by the firing rates of these neurons. Others more firmly rooted in the neurophysiological tradition of Evarts maintained that correlations to high-level movement parameters emerge artifactually, and in predictable patterns, from the biomechanical properties of the periphery. Peter Strick has colorfully referred to this controversy as a "muscles vs. movements" debate. Through a series of experimental and theoretical studies, my colleagues and I re-examine this debate in the context of neuralprosthetics. In particular, since all decoding algorithms use a state space description of the endeffector to represent movement and since these devices work pretty well, then does that not provide strong evidence for a Cartesian goal-oriented view of the motor cortex? We show that this is not the case and that, in fact, in many common experimental contexts the question of representation is ill-posed.