L. Bonini (University of Parma, IT) will give a lecture January 27 at 11h in the conference room of SBRI. You will find title and abstract below and more information on his laboratory here
From the Localization of Cortical Motor Functions to Understanding Ethological Actions: A Nonlinear Path
Decades of research on the primate cortical motor system have expanded our understanding of the anatomical and functional architecture underlying goal-directed actions. However, the coding principles of goal-directed actions remain unclear, particularly regarding the extent to which findings obtained in the highly restrained contexts (RCs) of laboratory settings generalize to close-to-natural, freely moving contexts (FMCs). In this lecture I will first examine available evidence on the single-neuron and population codes of goal-directed actions in laboratory conditions and present findings from a novel neurobehavioral platform. This platform enabled direct comparisons of premotor neuron activity and dynamics in both RCs and FMCs, as well as testing the causal impact of artificial neuronal activation using long-train, head-free intracortical microstimulation. The results reveal greater complexity and limited generalization of RC findings to FMCs, although a support vector machine classifier could accurately decode a variety of natural actions in FMCs. Furthermore, cross-context decoding confirmed that neural activity in FMCs is richer and more generalizable to RC than vice versa. These findings suggest that premotor control of natural goal-directed actions relies on cortical motor synergies rather than body-centered spatial or motor goals, and advocate for neuroethological approaches to better understand the neural basis of natural actions.
