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1Department of Biomedical Engineering and 2Department of Neurobiology, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri
Submitted 6 November 2006; accepted in final form 13 March 2007
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ABSTRACT |
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 TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTIONMETHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONAPPENDIXGRANTSACKNOWLEDGMENTSREFERENCES |
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INTRODUCTION |
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TOPABSTRACTINTRODUCTIONMETHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONAPPENDIXGRANTSACKNOWLEDGMENTSREFERENCES |
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). For the CNS to perform these transformations, the current arm position and arm velocity must be known.
In his seminal work, Bernstein (1935) argued that there is not a unique and unambiguous relationship between muscle excitation and arm movement kinematics. For instance, the nonlinear relationship between muscle activation and subsequent muscle force is highly dependent on both current muscle length and lengthening velocity (Zajac 1989). Muscles generate moments about the joints that vary with arm position. These muscle moments combine with internal joint reaction loads to generate joint torques. Although a specific joint torque acts locally, it induces joint accelerations throughout the whole system that vary significantly with the current position and velocity of the arm. These accelerations are integrated over time to reconstruct current hand position and velocity. Mathematically, this transformation can be represented as
 | (1) |
, 
, and 
are n x 1 vectors of joint angle, angular velocity, and angular acceleration, respectively; M is the mass matrix of the arm that varies with joint angle; T is the joint torque vector that varies with muscle activation (A), joint angle, and joint angular velocity; V is the vector of inertial torques (e.g., Coriolis forces, etc.); G is the gravity-induced torque vector; and E is a torque vector representing the external forces and torques applied to the system (Bernstein 1935; Chan and Moran 2006; Kane and Levinson 1985; Yamaguchi et al. 1995). Equation 1 is a nonlinear, coupled, second-order differential equation that relates muscle activation [A(t)] to hand position. This equation mathematically illustrates Bernstein's point that a unique relationship between muscle excitation and hand position during movement cannot exist. Therefore the CNS must be able to internally process Eq. 1 to accurately control hand position during a visuomotor reaching task.
Although it is generally agreed that Eq. 1 must be processed in some form in the CNS, there is great debate as to which structures represent/integrate the various aspects of such an internal model. For instance at one end of the spectrum, proponents of the equilibrium point hypothesis believe Eq. 1 is solved implicitly by kinematic feedback from muscle spindles rather than an explicit inverse dynamic solution; thus only kinematic information is contained in supraspinal structures (Bizzi et al. 1984; Feldman 1986). At the other end of the spectrum, the original work of Evarts (1968) suggested that the inverse solution to Eq. 1 was performed in cerebral cortex such that primary motor cortex represented muscle force or activation (i.e., kinetics). Regardless of which structures process which terms in Eq. 1, the computation of muscle activation requires information on the current state of the musculoskeletal system: arm position and velocity. Without knowledge of current arm location and velocity, the CNS would be incapable of accurately computing muscle activation.
Although the CNS requires information on current arm position and velocity to accurately control the arm, this does not necessarily imply that cerebral cortex requires or contains this information. Information on current arm position and velocity can be obtained both visually and proprioceptively. In proprioception, muscle spindles measure arm position and velocity and relay this information to the spinal cord. If the spinal cord performed the inverse computation of Eq. 1, then descending signals from cortex could be as simple as "final desired hand position" requiring no cortical representation of current hand position and/or velocity. However, patients with large-fiber myopathy (i.e., lack of spindle proprioception) were found to make reasonably accurate reaching movements in the presence of vision (Sainburg et al. 1993). This suggests a cortical representation of current hand position and velocity by visual pathways.
The representation of hand velocity in motor cortex has been extensively studied over the last 20 yr. Georgopoulos and colleagues found a high correlation between motor cortical activity and hand-movement direction in two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D, respectively) reaching tasks (Georgopoulos et al. 1982, 1986, 1988; Kalaska et al. 1983). Later Schwartz and colleagues showed that both hand speed and direction could be encoded by a population of motor cortical cells in both reaching and drawing movements (Moran and Schwartz 1999a,b; Schwartz 1992, 1993). The representation of hand position was also examined by several studies using multiple linear regression during a center-out task. It was shown that motor neuron firing rate was modulated by hand position under static conditions (Georgopoulos et al. 1984). Similar to the encoding of hand velocity, it was illustrated that hand position is encoded as a dot product between hand position vector and positional gradient, which was defined as the vector along which a difference in hand position leads to the greatest difference in neural activity (Kettner et al. 1988). It was also observed that there were neurons that encoded hand position while the hand was moving, although velocity representation was more dominant than position representation (Ashe and Georgopoulos 1994). Ebner and colleagues examined the temporal relationship between the cortical representations of position and velocity during reaching movements and argued that the representations of target direction, target position, and target distance appear sequentially (Fu et al. 1995). These previous studies showed that both position and velocity are encoded by motor-cortical neurons. However, the studies suffered from the fact that in the classic center-out task, there are high correlations between position and velocity (Chan and Moran 2006; Reina et al. 2001).
A recent study by Donoghue's group argued that both position and velocity can be encoded simultaneously by a single motor cortical neuron (Paninski et al. 2004) during a pursuit-tracking task. Their analysis found that motor cortical neurons encoded both position and velocity equally. However, the pursuit-tracking task allows only limited hand speeds (i.e., 4 vs. 40 cm/s achieved in reaching tasks). Given that directional encoding in motor cortical neurons is "gain field modulated" (i.e., multiplied) by speed (Moran and Schwartz 1999b), the relatively slow movements of the pursuit-tracking tasks limit the velocity response in the cortical activity.
Given the limitations of the aforementioned studies, a more comprehensive study would help to illuminate exactly how hand position and velocity are represented in motor cortical areas. This study uses two new behavioral reaching tasks—random reaching and standard reaching—to reduce position and velocity correlations during reaching. These tasks dissociate position and velocity while preserving the nature of stereotypical 3D reaching movements. The first goal of this study was to determine how both position and velocity information are simultaneously represented in motor cortical activity during reaching movement.
In recent years, several studies were performed in the area of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) where motor cortical activity has been decoded and used for closed-loop kinematic control of an external device (e.g., robotic arm or computer cursor). Most of these studies used a linear decoding method similar to the classic population vector algorithm (Georgopoulos et al. 1986) to extract a velocity signal that was subsequently integrated in time to yield a positional control signal (Carmena et al. 2003; Taylor et al. 2002; Wessberg et al. 2000). For kinematic control of an external device for short periods of time under medium to large movement speeds, integrating a decoded velocity signal is quite sufficient. For slower speeds, the gain field modulation of speed on directional tuning makes decoding velocity difficult; thus decoding positional information directly from motor cortical activity is more appropriate. Thus the second major goal of this study was to decode position and velocity simultaneously and independently from a population of motor cortical neurons during 3D reaching tasks.
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METHODS |
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TOPABSTRACTINTRODUCTIONMETHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONAPPENDIXGRANTSACKNOWLEDGMENTSREFERENCES |
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Two monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) were trained using operant conditioning to perform behavioral tasks within a virtual reality (VR) simulator as illustrated by Fig. 1A. The monkeys sat in a custom-made primate chair with their heads constrained for neurophysiological recording. Real-time 3D images were generated by a graphics workstation (Octane, Silicon Graphics). An optoelectronic tracking system (Optotrak 3020, Northern Digital) was used to track the 3D position of the hand in real time and feed it back to the graphics workstation. The monkeys performed various reaching tasks with their right arms within the computer-controlled environment and received a liquid reward after each successful trial.
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). At the beginning of this task, a target appeared at the center of the workspace. The monkey captured this center target with the cursor sphere and held it for a random interval (hold-A time). Next, the center target disappeared and one of the eight peripheral targets appeared. These eight targets were located at the eight corners of a virtual cube (10-cm sides). The targets were presented in a pseudorandom order and the monkey had to reach the target and remain there for a second random hold period (hold-B time) to make a successful reach. Five repetitions were made for each target so that a total of 40 center-out movements were made for each cell recorded in this study.
The random reaching task was designed to extensively sample the 3D hand position and 3D velocity (both speed and direction). The temporal structure of this task was identical to the center-out task. However, the monkey started from a randomly located target in the 3D workspace and reached for a second randomly located target. For each neuron recorded during this task, the subject made 
100 movements. Given the random nature of both the initial and final targets, the subject made reaches of varied lengths, durations, and speeds.
In the standard reaching task, the workspace was divided into eight small cubes, corresponding to eight octants (Fig. 1B). A reaching movement started from one of the eight corners of a small cube and ended at the opposite corner of that cube using the same timing parameters discussed earlier for center-out movements. For a complete set of standard reaching data, eight distinct reaching movements were performed within each one of the eight small cubes, yielding a total 64 different reaches. The 64 reaches were presented in a pseudorandom order. One complete set of data was collected for each neuron recorded during this task.
After the monkeys were well trained, a circular stainless steel recording chamber with an inner diameter of 16 mm was implanted over the contralateral primary motor cortex. Standard stereotaxic technique was used to center the recording chamber over the gyrus of proximal arm area of primary motor cortex (rostral M1). Recording electrodes were mounted in a 16-channel microdrive (Ekhorn System, Thomas Recording) and arranged into a linear array with interelectrode spacing of approximately 300 µm. Each electrode could be moved independently with a precision of 1 µm (Baker et al. 1999). For one subject, additional recordings from the same area were performed with chronically implanted microelectrode arrays (Center for Neural Communication Technologies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI). Single-unit activities were sorted with time–amplitude windows (Mountcastle et al. 1969) using customized spike-sorting software (OpenProject 1.5, Tucker-Davis Technologies). All stable and discriminable single units were recorded during the tasks and every attempt was made to record from all layers of the cortex. After the units were isolated, the subject performed the center-out task followed by either the standard reaching or random reaching task. After each data set, an examination was performed to determine whether each neuron responded to passive manipulation of either the shoulder or elbow of the contralateral arm.
All recorded neurons found to be in proximal arm area of rostral M1 (i.e., M1 gyrus only) were analyzed. Because neurons with low firing rates were not excluded, the firing rates of all neurons were computed using partial binning and square-root transform to ensure accurate firing-rate estimations (Moran and Schwartz 1999b; Reina et al. 2001; Richmond et al. 1987; Singh et al. 2002). Furthermore, when averaging activity across multiple neurons, the firing rates of all neurons were first normalized by their root-mean-square (RMS) values so that each neuron was equally weighted in the average.
Cortical activity model
This study investigated the motor cortical representation of 3D hand position and 3D hand velocity. This study's hypothesis is that the relationship between motor cortical neural activity and hand kinematics is
 | (2) |
v, p, 
, and 
are all 3D vectors; v is the preferred direction (PD) of a neuron; and p is the positional gradient (PG) of the same neuron. The magnitudes of p and v are the depths of modulation for position and velocity, respectively. The relative depth of modulation is the ratio between depth of modulation and baseline activity. is the hand velocity and is the hand position. 
p is the time delay between neural representation of hand position and actual hand position, whereas v is the delay for the hand velocity. The first three terms are based on the cortical activity model that encodes both velocity and speed (Moran and Schwartz 1999b). The last term represents the neuronal encoding of 3D hand position (Kettner et al. 1988). The model proposed in this study combines two previously presented models and suggests that multiple movement variables are simultaneously encoded in motor neuronal activity. It also assumes that the relationship between the neural representation of hand position and hand velocity is additive rather than multiplicative (i.e., gain field) with different temporal delays. The study presented here tested several aspects of the proposed model with single-unit data recorded from the proximal arm area of rostral primary motor cortex. Hand kinematics
The kinematic marker coordinates obtained from the optoelectronic tracking system were transformed into a monkey-centered reference frame. In this reference frame, the x-axis pointed anteriorly, the y-axis pointed superiorly, and the z-axis pointed to the right side of the monkey. The origin of this reference frame was the center of workspace where the center ball appeared in the center-out task. The position data, sampled at 100 Hz, were low-pass filtered with a cutoff frequency of 10 Hz (Moran and Schwartz 1999b; Woltring 1986). Movement onset was defined as the time when the hand speed first exceeded 15% of the peak speed and movement offset was defined as the time when the hand speed first dropped to <30% of the peak speed. The period between movement onset and offset was defined as movement time. Reaction time was defined as the time between distal target appearance and movement onset. To ensure that hand speed remained close to zero during the hold-B time, the time point where the hand speed first dropped to <15% of peak speed was identified and as long as the speed stayed at <15% of peak speed, that time was classified as hold-B time. Each trial was divided into three time periods: hold-A time, reaction and movement time, and hold-B time.
Average positional tuning
The average firing rates during each hold period (hold-A and hold-B) were calculated. Because the hand is not moving during the two hold periods, the neural representation of velocity should be zero (Moran and Schwartz 1999b). Under these conditions, Eq. 2 simplifies to the model proposed by Kettner et al. (1988)
 | (3) |
is the average neural activity; 
, 
, and 
are the average hand position during hold-A time or hold-B time; and bp,x, bp,y, and bp,z constitute the Bp vector in Eq. 2, which is the positional gradient (PG) of the neuron. A multiple linear regression was performed for each neuron over data obtained during the hold-A time and hold-B time to compute the PG using Eq. 3. Neurons with p-values <0.05 were considered significantly modulated by the 3D hand position. Average velocity tuning
Once the PG of each neuron was determined, a similar analysis was performed over reaction and movement time to compute the preferred direction (PD) of each neuron. However, during movement time, both position and velocity could affect neural activity. The neural activity arising from position was estimated by multiplying the actual hand position vector during the reaction and movement periods with the PG vector calculated in the previous analysis during the hold times. To remove the effect of position, the estimated neural activity representing position was subtracted from the total neural activity. This allows Eq. 2 to be simplified as follows
 | (4) |
is the average neural activity; , , and 
are the average hand velocity terms during movement time; and bv,x, bv,y, and bv,z constitute the Bv vector in Eq. 2, which is the PD of the neuron. A multiple linear regression was performed using Eq. 4. Neurons with P values <0.05 were considered significantly modulated by the 3D hand velocity.
A neuron that is tuned to both position and velocity will have both PG and PD vectors. Two analyses were performed to examine whether PD and PG of the same neuron point in the same direction in 3D space. In the first analysis, a spherical correlation was calculated to examine the correlation between PD and PG (Fisher and Lee 1986; Georgopoulos et al. 1988). In the second analysis, the PD and PG of each neuron were rotated simultaneously in exactly the same way such that all the PDs were aligned along the anterior direction. The rotated PGs then revealed the relative 3D orientation between PD and PG. For example, if PD and PG of the same neuron always point in the same direction, all of the rotated PGs will cluster around the anterior direction.
Interaction between position and velocity tuning
Our hypothesis states that a neuron encodes position and velocity information in an additive manner during the movement (Eq. 2). To test this hypothesis, the neural activity during movement time was further examined using the standard reaching data. The standard reaching task contains sets of movements made within eight different movement spaces (i.e., octants). For each neuron, the eight sets of movements were divided into two classes depending on their locations relative to the neuron's preferred spatial location (PG vector). The first class was the four octants that were generally in the direction of the PG and the second class was the remaining four octants (which were generally in the opposite direction of the PG). Within each class, a velocity tuning curve was constructed, where neural activity was graphed against the velocity–PD angle. These two curves represent movements within the "preferred" spatial location and movements within the "antipreferred" spatial location. The difference between those two curves reflects the effect of hand position on velocity tuning. The two curves were fitted with a standard cosine tuning function
 | (5) |
is the velocity–PD angle; b0 is the baseline firing rate of the fitted cosine curve; and b1 is the amplitude of the curve or the "absolute depth of modulation." Changes in b0 would shift the tuning curve vertically, representing an additive effect of position on velocity tuning, whereas changes in b1 would scale the tuning curve and represent a multiplicative or gain field effect of position on velocity tuning.
A similar analysis was performed to determine the effect of velocity on position tuning. The neural activities were first classified based on whether the movement direction was along a neuron's preferred direction or opposite to its preferred direction. Then, within each class, a hand position tuning curve was constructed. Again, cosine functions were fit to the two curves, except was the hand position–PG angle. The baselines and depth of modulations for the two position tuning curves were computed and compared. As in the previous analysis, if b0 changes between the two classes, then there is an additive relationship between velocity and position tuning. If b1 changes, there is a multiplicative or gain field relationship between velocity and position tuning.
Multibin temporal analysis
For neurons tuned to both position and velocity, the positional depth of modulation was examined as a function of time during reaching. The movement time of each reach was divided into 40 equal time bins. Using the same bin width, 30 prebins (before movement) and 30 postbins (after movement) were defined (Reina et al. 2001). After the 100 time bins for each trial were determined, neuronal firing rates were computed and low-pass filtered with a cutoff frequency of 10 Hz. For each neuron, the baseline and nondirectional speed component were computed [i.e., by averaging the neural activity across all standard reaching movements (Moran and Schwartz 1999b)] and subtracted from the total neural activity time series. Because the baseline and the nondirectional component of the firing rate were eliminated in the multibin analysis, the instantaneous cortical activity (i.e., Eq. 2) can be simplified into the following equation
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 | (7) |
being the position–PG angle (i.e., a positional tuning curve was generated for each time bin). The depths of modulation of those tuning curves were used to find the temporal dynamics of position tuning. Population decoding analysis
This study introduces the indirect optimal linear estimator (indirect OLE) method to simultaneously decode both 3D hand position and 3D hand velocity. The indirect OLE method has three steps. First, the encoding vectors are computed (PDs and PGs) using multiple-linear regressions (i.e., Eqs. 3 and 4) from standard reaching and random reaching data. Second, an optimal set of decoding vectors is computed directly from the encoding vectors. These optimized decoding vectors will minimize the effects of correlations between PDs and PGs and reduce the effects of nonuniform distributions of PDs and PGs. Third, movement kinematics are estimated using the decoding vectors and instantaneous firing-rate data from the center-out task. For full mathematical details of the indirect OLE algorithm, see the APPENDIX.
The actual and estimated hand velocity curves were averaged over eight center-out targets and three dimensions. The time lag at which the maximum cross-correlation between the actual and decoded average hand velocity occurred was taken as the delay between neural activity and kinematics (Moran and Schwartz 1999b). For hand position, the signal was a sigmoidal shape. So, instead of cross-correlation, the estimated hand position signal was slid forward in time to minimize the RMS error between the estimated and the actual position signal. The time lag with the minimum RMS error was chosen as the best estimate of delay between neural representation of position and actual hand position.
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RESULTS |
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TOPABSTRACTINTRODUCTIONMETHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONAPPENDIXGRANTSACKNOWLEDGMENTSREFERENCES |
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Average positional tuning and average velocity tuning
The neuronal firing rate was examined as a function of hand position when the hand was held statically during the random reaching task. Figure 2A shows how firing rate is related to hand position for a representative neuron when the hand was held 80 mm away from the center of the workspace. The neuron was most active when the hand was held within the posterior part of the workspace. The neuron firing-rate data were averaged along the direction orthogonal to the positional gradient and plotted as a function of hand position along the anterior/posterior direction and superior/inferior direction. The firing rate varied in a linear fashion with hand position (Fig. 2B). These results confirm the existence of 3D positional tuning in motor cortical neurons during static hold time and support the linear encoding model proposed by Kettner et al. (1988). Figure 3 illustrates the distribution of the neurons with different tuning properties. Overall, 542 neurons (55%) were tuned to hand velocity and 312 neurons (32%) were tuned to hand position.
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). Both PGs and PDs were nonuniformly distributed in 3D space (P < 0.05) (Fig. 6). Two-dimensional Rayleigh tests were used to examine whether the distributions were uniform within the individual planes (Batschelet 1981). The PDs were uniformly distributed only in the coronal plane (P < 0.05), which is consistent with previous studies (Moran and Schwartz 1999b). However, in both the sagittal and horizontal planes, the PDs were more clustered along the anterior/posterior direction. The PGs were nonuniformly distributed within all three planes. In the sagittal and horizontal planes, similar to the PDs, the PGs tended to cluster around the anterior/posterior direction. In the coronal plane, more PGs pointed toward the superior-right direction. In general, over the population, both PGs and PDs showed a similar trend and tended to point to anterior/posterior direction.
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Figure 8A shows the effect of hand position on velocity tuning during movement time. Neural activity was consistently higher for movements made in the "preferred" position than for movements made in the "antipreferred" position. The difference was independent of movement velocity direction, as indicated by the upward shift of the velocity tuning curve. Figure 8B compares the baselines and depths of modulation of the fitted tuning curves based on their 95% confidence intervals. There was a higher baseline level for movements made within the "preferred" position, suggesting that position shifts velocity tuning curves rather than scaling them. Figure 8C shows the position tuning curve was higher for movement along the PDs: the upward shifting was more prominent than that in Fig. 8A. The difference in neural activity was constant across all hand positions in Fig. 8C. Figure 8D shows the same pattern as Fig. 8B, indicating that hand velocity has a shifting (not scaling) effect on position tuning. These shifts in tuning curves illustrate that hand position is encoded simultaneously with hand velocity during movement time and that the neural activity can be described by the additive model proposed in Eq. 2. By comparing the depth of modulation for velocity tuning in Fig. 8A and depth of modulation for position tuning in Fig. 8C, position depth of modulation was shown to be much smaller than velocity depth of modulation, thus agreeing with Fig. 5.
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In Fig. 9A, the neural activity of the 301 velocity-only–tuned neurons was plotted as a function of time and the hand velocity–PD angle. Before movement onset, neural activity was the same across different velocity–PD angles. During movement time, neural activity showed directional tuning with the strongest activity along the PD. In addition, neural activity scaled with hand speed, echoing the stereotypical bell-shape profile of reaching movements. During the hold-B time, approximately the last 400 ms, hand speed and neural activity returned to zero.
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In Fig. 9C, the neural activity of the 222 neurons tuned to both position and velocity was plotted as a function of time and velocity–PD angle. This plot is a hybrid of Fig. 9, A and B. During movement time, the neural activity modulated with hand movement direction and hand speed, similar to Fig. 9A. In consequence of the correlation between velocity–PD and position–PG, the neural activity was modulated according to position at the end of movement, as evidenced by the tilted edge of the neural activity surface.
Population decoding analysis
Six degrees of freedom, including 3D hand position and 3D hand velocity, were decoded simultaneously from motor cortical activity. The standard reaching and random reaching data were used to compute the encoding vectors, whereas the center-out movement data were used to test the decoding method. The 224 neurons tuned to hand position were used to decode hand position. Similarly, the 387 velocity-tuned neurons were used for velocity decoding. The r2 values between actual and decoded movements are 0.76 for position and 0.83 for velocity (Fig. 10). For center-out movement, the velocity signal peaks in the middle of the movement and returns to zero, whereas the position signal rises monotonically.
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). For position decoding, the actual hand position lagged the cortical representation of the position signal by 81 ms (Fig. 11B), which was slightly shorter than the delay for hand velocity signal.
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Previous analyses assumed that the relative weights between position tuning and velocity tuning were constant throughout the reaching movement. This assumption was tested by examining the position depth of modulation as a function of time. The effect of hand velocity on neural activity was removed by averaging standard reaching movements made within the same octant. The neural activity for each of the 100 bins was fit with a cosine-tuning function using the average position of each octant as the independent variable. The resulting 100 fits were statistically significant (P < 0.05) for all 100 bins. Figure 12 shows depth of modulation for position changes with time, which significantly decreases just before movement onset and gradually increases near the end of the movement. The temporal lag between occurrence of the minimum position depth of modulation and the maximum hand speed was found to be 200 ms.
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DISCUSSION |
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TOPABSTRACTINTRODUCTIONMETHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONAPPENDIXGRANTSACKNOWLEDGMENTSREFERENCES |
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Various behavioral paradigms were previously developed to study motor cortical representation of movement parameters. One of the most popular designs was the center-out task introduced by Georgopoulos and colleagues (1982). It was widely used in both electrophysiological studies (Fu et al. 1995; Moran and Schwartz 1999b; Schwartz et al. 1988; Scott and Kalaska 1997) and human psychophysics studies (Thoroughman and Shadmehr 2000). However, one problem is that hand velocity and hand position are inherently correlated in the center-out task. This makes it very difficult to independently study the cortical representation of position and velocity. To dissociate hand position and hand velocity, this study introduced two new behavioral paradigms: random reaching and standard reaching.
The center-out, random reaching, and standard reaching tasks all belong to the category of "step-tracking" movement. In these tasks the subjects can compute/determine the entire trajectory before movement onset. Because of this knowledge, step-tracking tasks are much faster (typically an order of magnitude in peak speeds) than random pursuit-tracking tasks (Paninski et al. 2004) where impending movements are unknown. Second, the pursuit-tracking movement is different from stereotypical arm reaching movement and may involve different motor control mechanisms. Pursuit tracking relies heavily on on-line visual feedback, whereas stereotypical reaching uses more feedforward control, especially during the ballistic part of the movement (Paillard 1982). Therefore the standard reaching and random reaching tasks form an optimal set of behavioral tasks for investigating position and velocity encoding during reaching movements.
Both position and velocity are represented in motor cortex
This study confirms the existence of a position representation in the motor cortex during reaching. This representation was present not only during the static target-holding times (Georgopoulos et al. 1984; Kettner et al. 1988), but also during the movement time (Ashe and Georgopoulos 1994; Paninski et al. 2004). Both position and velocity are encoded in the form of a vector dot product between the encoding vector and the encoded physical variable, which has classically been referred to as "cosine-tuning function" (Georgopoulos et al. 1982, 1986, 1988). The encoding vectors (PD for velocity and PG for position) are spatially correlated and point to similar directions. The 3D distributions of the encoding vectors were both nonuniform distributions with similar patterns. More encoding vectors lie along the anterior–posterior direction than along the other directions. Scott and colleagues (2001) observed a similar distribution of PDs and argued that this was a result of the nonisotropic mechanical property of the arm.
Previous studies in pursuit-tracking experiments suggested that position and velocity were encoded simultaneously (Paninski et al. 2004), whereas similar studies in reaching tasks suggested a sequential encoding where the cortical representations of target direction, position, and distance were represented in a sequential order (Fu et al. 1995). Although these studies suggest a cortical encoding dichotomy between pursuit-tracking and reaching movements, our results support both these previous findings. Temporally, it was found that position and velocity were encoded simultaneously during reaching; however, the saliency or "depth of modulation" of position encoding decreased during movement onset and returned to premovement levels near the end of the movement. During the movement, positional depth of modulation decreases and velocity depth of modulation increases proportionally to the speed. These changes in cortical activity could easily account for the appearance of serial encoding of position and velocity seen in the Fu et al. (1995) multiple regression study. In addition, Fu et al. (1995) observed that more than one fourth of the neurons had statistically significant partial R2 values for both position and velocity signals at the same time.
Our results suggest that the relative weights of the position and velocity signals change dynamically during the movement. The position signal was weighted more during static holding time than during movement time. There is a 200-ms delay between occurrence of the minimum position depth of modulation and the maximum hand speed. When the position depth of modulation profile and the speed profile were temporally shifted so that they overlapped, the relationship between position depth of modulation and hand speed was well fit by a straight line, suggesting that the position depth of modulation was inversely proportional to temporally shifted hand speed. Therefore tentatively, the cortical activity model proposed in Eq. 2 can be further improved by adding a scaling factor to scale the positional gradients based on the prediction of hand speed
 | (8) |
w denotes the temporal lag between the position depth of modulation curve and hand velocity profile.
Equation 8 assumes that the decrease seen in positional coding during movement onset in reaching tasks is a function of speed. Another explanation for the decrease in saliency of positional coding is that it is a function of movement initiation. For instance, if the subject were to perform a drawing task such as tracing a figure at speeds comparable to reaching (Moran and Schwartz 1999a; Schwartz and Moran 1999; Schwartz et al. 2004) in each of the eight octants in the workspace, it is possible that the positional depth of modulation could increase to premovement levels soon after movement initiation while the hand was still moving at a fairly significant speed. A third explanation for the decrease in position coding during initiation of reaching tasks is that it could be signaling a difference in motor control strategies. For instance, the initial portion of a reach was previously described as a feedforward movement requiring little visual feedback (Paillard 1982). However, before movement onset as well as near the end of the reach, visual feedback is critical; thus the depression in positional coding could be a reflection of enhanced feedforward control versus visual feedback control. More study is necessary to determine the neurophysiological factors behind the decrease in positional saliency during movement onset.
Velocity representation in motor cortex covaries directly with movement speed (Moran and Schwartz 1999b). Equation 8 suggests position representation in motor cortex covaries inversely with movement speed during reaching. Velocity was previously reported to be dominant in motor cortical activity during reaching (Ashe and Georgopoulos 1994). However, a recent study argued that about equal amounts of position and velocity information are represented in motor neurons (Paninski et al. 2004) during pursuit tracking. The hand speed in that study was much slower than that achieved during natural reaching movements, which should reduce the velocity contribution to the variance of the neural firing rate. At the population level, our study found that 55% of approximately 1,000 neurons were tuned to velocity and only 32% of those neurons were tuned to position. Furthermore, at the single-neuron level, for those tuned to position and velocity, the velocity depth of modulation was found in this study to be fourfold greater than the position depth of modulation. This is important because depth of modulation is proportional to both signal-to-noise level and information rate. So overall it seems that both position and velocity tuning are modulated by speed (one inversely and one directly), but for natural movements, velocity is represented greater than position in motor cortex.
This study analyzed the relationship between hand kinematics (position and velocity) and motor cortical activity. However, previous studies suggested that arm kinematics (i.e., joint angles and joint angular velocities) may be better correlated to motor cortical activity than hand kinematics (Caminiti et al. 1991; Scott and Kalaska 1997). Our previous studies showed that hand kinematics and arm kinematics are highly correlated during center-out–style reaching tasks, making it difficult to discern which coordinate system best correlates with motor cortical activity (Chan and Moran 2006; Reina et al. 2001). Furthermore, a preliminary study from our laboratory found that motor cortical activity in the proximal arm area is also significantly modulated by hand orientation kinematics in addition to the hand translational kinematics analyzed in this study (Wang et al. 2004). The behavioral tasks used in this study were specifically designed such that the animal did not significantly vary hand orientation within the workspace. If it did, additional hand orientation kinematic terms would be required in Eq. 2. Regardless of whether motor cortical activity is represented in extrinsic coordinates (hand translation/orientation) or intrinsic coordinates (joint angles), the relationship between position and velocity encoding in motor cortex found in this study would be the same for either coordinate system.
Population decoding of 3D hand position and 3D hand velocity
The additive formulation shown in Eq. 2 makes it possible to construct a 6D encoding vector that concatenates PG and PD, which can be thought of as a "preferred movement" vector, in 6D space. One way to predict movement kinematics from preferred movement vectors is to use the population vector algorithm (PVA) (Georgopoulos et al. 1986). In addition to providing a fairly accurate estimation of the velocity signal, PVA can also illustrate the neural delay between cortical representation of movement and the actual expression of movement (Moran and Schwartz 1999a,b). Thus it is natural to extend PVA to 6D space to decode both 3D hand position and 3D hand velocity and compare the neural delays for position and velocity signals. One disadvantage of PVA is that the encoding vectors have to be uniformly distributed in the encoded space and, because preferred directions and positional gradients are correlated, the encoding vectors are not uniformly distributed in 6D space.
A second candidate is the optimal linear estimator (OLE) method, originally proposed to accurately decode movement direction with a small number of neurons whose preferred directions were nonuniformly distributed (Salinas and Abbott 1994). Thus it is a perfect candidate to be applied in 6D space to simultaneously decode position and velocity. When PVA and OLE were compared with simulated data, OLE performed much better than PVA when PDs and PGs were correlated (Wang et al. 2003). However, the disadvantage of traditional OLE is that it is not able to determine the neural delay between the cortical representation of movement kinematics and the actual hand movements (Carmena et al. 2003; Hatsopoulos et al. 2004; Paninski et al. 2004). This study introduced the indirect OLE method as a solution that combines the advantages of both PVA and OLE. It can dissociate the correlations between PDs and PGs to provide an independent estimation of position and velocity (OLE property) and it can reveal neuronal delays between cortical representation and kinematics (PVA property).
Experimentally, the indirect OLE has two advantages. First, the neurons used in decoding studies do not need to be recorded simultaneously. The encoding vector of a specific neuron was computed based on the firing rate of the individual neuron only and its corresponding hand kinematics. This property will allow experimentalists to be able to more easily compare neurons across different recording sessions and different tasks because each neuron's encoding vector is independent of all the other neurons, which is not the case with traditional OLE. This will also greatly benefit off-line decoding studies that aim to understand the neural representation of physical variables at the population level. Second, the indirect OLE method's computation of its weights is more efficient and stable, especially at high neuron counts, than the original OLE method. The original OLE procedure involves the inversion of a large n x n matrix, where n is the number of neurons versus a 6 x 6 matrix for the indirect OLE (see APPENDIX).
In summary, both position and velocity signals are well represented in motor cortex during static target-holding time as well as movement time; however, the velocity signal is more pronounced, especially during movement. Both 3D hand position and 3D hand velocity signals can be reconstructed from a population of motor cortical neurons. It is suggested that the position signal and velocity signal could differ in the delays between the cortical representation of the signal and its actual expression. Future studies that apply circular drawing movement with sinusoidal position and velocity signals will be able to better elucidate the temporal features of the cortical representations of hand position and hand velocity.
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APPENDIX |
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TOPABSTRACTINTRODUCTIONMETHODSRESULTSDISCUSSIONAPPENDIXGRANTSACKNOWLEDGMENTSREFERENCES |
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 | (A1) |
is the estimated movement; W is the optimal linear decoding weights, or decoding vectors; R is the neural activity; t is the total number of time points for decoding analysis; and n is the total number of neurons. The subscripts denote the dimension of each matrix. Each row of is a 6D vector containing estimated 3D hand position and 3D hand velocity in the format of [
] at a particular time instant. Each row of R represents the neural activities of all the neurons at a particular instant time. Each row of W contains the decoding vector in 6D for an individual neuron.
Many studies that implemented the original OLE method computed the decoding vectors directly from hand kinematics and neuronal firing rates based on a training data set (Carmena et al. 2003; Paninski et al. 2004). Different from the traditional method, to find out the decoding vectors in W, the indirect OLE method explicitly used the encoding model to compute the decoding vectors. It first computed the prefer
