Publications [#336090] of Miguel A. Nicolelis

Papers Published

1. Yin, A; Tseng, PH; Rajangam, S; Lebedev, MA; Nicolelis, MAL (2018). Place Cell-Like Activity in the Primary Sensorimotor and Premotor Cortex During Monkey Whole-Body Navigation.. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 9184. [doi]
   (last updated on 2023/06/01)

   Abstract:
   Primary motor (M1), primary somatosensory (S1) and dorsal premotor (PMd) cortical areas of rhesus monkeys previously have been associated only with sensorimotor control of limb movements. Here we show that a significant number of neurons in these areas also represent body position and orientation in space. Two rhesus monkeys (K and M) used a wheelchair controlled by a brain-machine interface (BMI) to navigate in a room. During this whole-body navigation, the discharge rates of M1, S1, and PMd neurons correlated with the two-dimensional (2D) room position and the direction of the wheelchair and the monkey head. This place cell-like activity was observed in both monkeys, with 44.6% and 33.3% of neurons encoding room position in monkeys K and M, respectively, and the overlapping populations of 41.0% and 16.0% neurons encoding head direction. These observations suggest that primary sensorimotor and premotor cortical areas in primates are likely involved in allocentrically representing body position in space during whole-body navigation, which is an unexpected finding given the classical hierarchical model of cortical processing that attributes functional specialization for spatial processing to the hippocampal formation.