Regional specialization of movement encoding across the primate sensorimotor cortex

Simon Borgognon, Nicolò Macellari, Alexandra M. Hickey, Matthew G. Perich, Houman Javaheri, Rafael Ornelas-Kobayashi, Maude Delacombaz, Christopher Hitz, Florian Fallegger, Stéphanie P. Lacour, Erwan Bezard, Eric M. Rouiller, Jocelyne Bloch, Tomislav Milekovic (), Ismael Seáñez () and Grégoire Courtine ()
Additional contact information
Simon Borgognon: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Nicolò Macellari: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Alexandra M. Hickey: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Matthew G. Perich: University of Geneva
Houman Javaheri: ETH Zürich and University of Zürich
Rafael Ornelas-Kobayashi: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Maude Delacombaz: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Christopher Hitz: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Florian Fallegger: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Stéphanie P. Lacour: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Erwan Bezard: UMR 5293
Eric M. Rouiller: University of Fribourg
Jocelyne Bloch: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Tomislav Milekovic: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Ismael Seáñez: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Grégoire Courtine: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-18

Abstract: Abstract The process by which the cerebral cortex generates movements to achieve different tasks remains poorly understood. Here, we leveraged the rich repertoire of well-controlled primate locomotor behaviors to study how task-specific movements are encoded across the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd), primary motor cortex (M1), and primary somatosensory cortex (S1) under naturalistic conditions. Neural population activity was confined within low-dimensional manifolds and partitioned into task-dependent and task-independent subspaces. However, the prevalence of these subspaces differed between cortical regions. PMd primarily operated within its task-dependent subspace, while S1, and to a lesser extent M1, largely evolved within their task-independent subspaces. The temporal structure of movement was encoded in the task-independent subspaces, which also dominated the PMd-to-M1 communication as the movement plans were translated into motor commands. Our results suggest that the brain utilizes different cortical regions to serialize the motor control by first performing task-specific computations in PMd to then generate task-independent commands in M1.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61172-8 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-61172-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-61172-8

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().