Even when the primary visual cortical area is absent bilaterally from early life, the rest of a primate visual brain can develop and function normally to support day-to-day visual behaviour.
The novel Reach Cage allows neurophysiology studies of structured behavior with unrestrained Rhesus macaques showing that the frontoparietal reach network is selective for reach goals outside the immediately reachable space.
Using a sequential neurofeedback-arm reaching task, a new link is established among population neural activity patterns, generation of beta oscillations, and motor behavior changes.
When Rhesus monkeys plan reaching movements of which they are not fully confident, a particular area of the brain represents both the chosen action as well as alternate movements, perhaps as an aid for error correction or learning.
A novel analysis of neural activity recorded in monkeys performing a “brain-machine interface” task reveals that a mismatch between motor effectors and the brains’ internal models of those effectors can explain a substantial portion of movement errors.
Motor neurons adjust their sensitivity to direction of movement in a manner analogous to how neurons in the visual system adjust their sensitivity to light.
