Motor Plans and Representations - Donoghue Lab, Neuroscience Dept., Brown U.

My research currently focuses on differentiating the kinematic characteristics and neural control of familiar, trained movements vs. unfamiliar, novel movements. Some sort of pre-learned information defines a familiar movement as such; how does the activity within and across different brain regions reflect this internal plan? I hypothesize that parietal area 5d carries multimodal information about plans for movement sequences, and shares this internal plan information with primary motor cortex.

--Benjamin Philip

Figure: Target and hand cursor paths during one sample trial with an unfamiliar movement sequence. We rewarded the primate participant for keeping its hand cursor in contact with a continuously moving target. Thick line represents monkey hand cursor path; thin line represents center of target path. Black square indicates target starting position and target size; black circle indicates hand cursor starting position. Thick grey square indicates area in which target was occluded (second segment only). Color denotes speed. A: Unfamiliar (novel) sequence. B: Familiar (trained) sequence.