There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
<p id="P1">Neural circuits must transform new inputs into outputs without prematurely
affecting
downstream circuits, while still maintaining other ongoing communication with these
targets. We investigated how this isolation is achieved in motor cortex when macaques
received visual feedback signaling a movement perturbation. To overcome limitations
in estimating the mapping from cortex to arm movements, we also conducted brain-machine
interface (BMI) experiments where we could definitively identify neural firing patterns
as output-null or output-potent. This revealed that perturbation-evoked responses
were initially restricted to output-null patterns that cancelled out at the neural
population code readout, and only later entered output-potent neural dimensions. This
mechanism was facilitated by the circuit's large null space and its ability to strongly
modulate output-potent dimensions when generating corrective movements. These results
show that the nervous system can temporarily isolate portions of a circuit's activity
from its downstream targets by restricting this activity to the circuit's output-null
neural dimensions.
</p>