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Murray R Jarvis

Publications and source records attributed to Murray R Jarvis.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Cortical local field potential encodes movement intentions in the posterior parietal cortex.

The cortical local field potential (LFP) is a summation signal of excitatory and inhibitory dendritic potentials that has recently become of increasing interest. We report that LFP signals in the parietal reach region (PRR) of the posterior parietal cortex of macaque monkeys have temporal structure that varies with the type of planned or executed motor behavior. LFP signals from PRR provide better decode performance for reaches compared to saccades and have stronger coherency with simultaneously recorded spiking activity during the planning of reach movements than during saccade planning. LFP signals predict the animal's behavioral state (e.g., planning a reach or saccade) and the direction of the currently planned movement from single-trial information. This new evidence provides further support for a role of the parietal cortex in movement planning and the potential application of LFP signals for a brain-machine interface.

Animals↗

Adaptive filtering of vibrissa input in motor cortex of rat.

We studied the transformation of sensory input as it progresses from vibrissa primary sensor (S1) to motor (M1) cortex. Single-unit activity was obtained from alert adult rats that did not to whisk upon application of punctate, rhythmic stimulation of individual vibrissae. The spike response of units in S1 cortex largely reproduced the shape of the stimulus. In contrast, the spiking output of units in M1 cortex were modulated solely as a sinusoid at the repetition rate of the stimulus for frequencies between 5 and 15 Hz; this range corresponds to that of natural whisking. Thus, the S1 to M1 transformation extracts the fundamental frequency from a spectrally rich stimulus. We discuss our results in terms of a band-pass filter with a center frequency that adapts to the change in stimulation rate.

Action Potentials↗

Direct visuomotor transformations for reaching.

The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is thought to have a function in the sensorimotor transformations that underlie visually guided reaching, as damage to the PPC can result in difficulty reaching to visual targets in the absence of specific visual or motor deficits. This function is supported by findings that PPC neurons in monkeys are modulated by the direction of hand movement, as well as by visual, eye position and limb position signals. The PPC could transform visual target locations from retinal coordinates to hand-centred coordinates by combining sensory signals in a serial manner to yield a body-centred representation of target location, and then subtracting the body-centred location of the hand. We report here that in dorsal area 5 of the PPC, remembered target locations are coded with respect to both the eye and hand. This suggests that the PPC transforms target locations directly between these two reference frames. Data obtained in the adjacent parietal reach region (PRR) indicate that this transformation may be achieved by vectorially subtracting hand location from target location, with both locations represented in eye-centred coordinates.

Animals↗