The Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Freiburg

Announcement for the next

BCCN Seminar

Dr. Alexander Gail

Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience (BCCN)
German Primate Center
Göttingen

Context-specific sensorimotor transformations in parietal cortex

Sensorimotor transformations do not only depend on sensory input, but also on internal behavioral goals. We can flexibly associate different motor actions with the same sensory stimulus, e.g., reach towards an object or avoid it. How do we integrate decisions about a movement with sensorimotor transformations to achieve goal-directed behavior? The parietal reach region (PRR) in the medial intraparietal cortex of rhesus monkeys specifically is involved in visuospatial planning of arm reaches. What are the neural dynamics of the visuomotor transformations in PRR and how do they depend on learned rules?
To investigate context-specific sensorimotor transformations single neuron activity and local field potentials (LFP) were recorded while monkeys performed a memory-guided anti-reach task. Results show that PRR represents context-specific sensorimotor transformations. Information about the visual cue, and especially, about the goal of an upcoming movement can be decoded from the neuronal population activity based

Host: Dr. Carsten Mehring