Brain-machine interface cursor position only weakly affects monkey and human motor cortical activity in the absence of arm movements.

ABSTRACT: Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) that decode movement intentions should ignore neural modulation sources distinct from the intended command. However, neurophysiology and control theory suggest that motor cortex reflects the motor effector's position, which could be a nuisance variable. We investigated motor cortical correlates of BMI cursor position with or without concurrent arm movement. We show in two monkeys that subtracting away estimated neural correlates of position improves online BMI performance only if the animals were allowed to move their arm. To understand why, we compared the neural variance attributable to cursor position when the same task was performed using arm reaching, versus arms-restrained BMI use. Firing rates correlated with both BMI cursor and hand positions, but ha

SUBMITTER: Stavisky SD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6218537 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature