Abstract
Objective. In the last decade, multiple brain areas have been investigated with respect to their decoding capability of continuous arm or hand movements. So far, these studies have mainly focused on motor or premotor areas like M1 and F5. However, there is accumulating evidence that anterior intraparietal area (AIP) in the parietal cortex also contains information about continuous movement. Approach. In this study, we decoded 27 degrees of freedom representing complete hand and arm kinematics during a delayed grasping task from simultaneously recorded activity in areas M1, F5, and AIP of two macaque monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Main results. We found that all three areas provided decoding performances that lay significantly above chance. In particular, M1 yielded highest decoding accuracy followed by F5 and AIP. Furthermore, we provide support for the notion that AIP does not only code categorical visual features of objects to be grasped, but also contains a substantial amount of temporal kinematic information. Significance. This fact could be utilized in future developments of neural interfaces restoring hand and arm movements.
Highlights
The ability to perform dexterous hand manipulations is crucial for a person’s well-being (Anderson 2004)
Representative example trajectories of the 27 degrees of freedom (DOF) from recording Z032012 are shown in figure 2 while the monkey grasped and lifted a horizontal bar, a cube, and a small ball
This paper investigated the possibility of decoding complete hand, wrist, and arm kinematics from single and multiunit activity in the hand areas of motor (M1), premotor (F5), and parietal cortex (AIP)
Summary
The ability to perform dexterous hand manipulations is crucial for a person’s well-being (Anderson 2004). In order to restore the skill of everyday hand movements in patients who have lost this ability due to spinal cord injuries, loss of limbs or other motor diseases, the development of neuroprostheses could be very beneficial. Translate neural activity from brain areas involved in movement generation into motor output signals to control an external actuator as a hand and arm replacement. Several areas in the brain have been identified to be involved in this
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