| Notes: | Advisors: Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos; Daniel Margoliash.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--The University of Chicago, Division of Biological Sciences and the Pritzker School of Medicine, Committee on Neurobiology, 2009.
Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-08, Section: B, page: 4671.
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| Summary: | In this thesis, I present a number of findings that support an expanded view of the role of primary motor cortex in visually-guided reaching. In Chapter 1, I show that the temporal profile of correlations between different aspects of a reach makes it easy to misinterpret the heterogeneous tuning of MI neurons as being related to a common feature of movement. In Chapter 2, I show that motor cortex is involved in the generation of movement plans during passive observation of target-directed cursor movements, challenging the idea that MI is exclusively responsible for the ongoing control of the kinematics or dynamics of the arm. In Chapter 3, I examine the detailed time course of target-evoked activity in MI during continuous, self-paced movements. I show that neural responses to targets are highly precise, and that their timing is shaped by the intrinsic, ongoing periodicity in MI firing. The detailed temporal evolution of this response period activity during self-paced movements has been poorly studied in MI, in part because of the assumption that visually-guided reaching is naturally decomposed into distinct stages of planning and execution.
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