Independent representations of ipsilateral and contralateral limbs in primary motor cortex
- Queen's University, Canada
Abstract
Several lines of research demonstrate that primary motor cortex (M1) is principally involved in controlling the contralateral side of the body. However, M1 activity has been correlated with both contralateral and ipsilateral limb movements. Why does ipsilaterally-related activity not cause contralateral motor output? To address this question, we trained monkeys to counter mechanical loads applied to their right and left limbs. We found >50% of M1 neurons had load-related activity for both limbs. Contralateral loads evoked changes in activity ~10ms sooner than ipsilateral loads. We also found corresponding population activities were distinct, with contralateral activity residing in a subspace that was orthogonal to the ipsilateral activity. Thus, neural responses for the contralateral limb can be extracted without interference from the activity for the ipsilateral limb, and vice versa. Our results show that M1 activity unrelated to downstream motor targets can be segregated from activity related to the downstream motor output.
Data availability
Neural and kinematic data have been submitted to the Dryad repository and can be accessed at https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.06nr12f
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Data from: Independent representations of ipsilateral and contralateral arms in primary motor cortexDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.06nr12f.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR MOP 84403)
- Stephen H Scott
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR PJT 153445)
- Stephen H Scott
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Studies were approved by the Queen's University Research Ethics Board and Animal Care Committee (#Scott-2010-035).
Copyright
© 2019, Heming et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Independent representations of ipsilateral and contralateral limbs in primary motor cortex
eLife 8:e48190.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.48190
