MOTOR COMPONENTS IN MOTOR SKILL LEARNING AND PERFORMANCE

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The goal of this project is to understand how neural representations of simple movements are combined to learn and perform complex, motor skills. Learning to perform many complex, sequential movements including play a musical instrument, engaging in a sport, speaking, or writing can be viewed as the process by which already learned movement segments or "primitives" are bound together in novel ways. Multi-channel recordings will be made using a novel 100 electrode array implanted in the primary (MI) and supplementary motor areas (SMA) of monkey cortex while the animals learns to perform sequential movements of the hand and arm. Theoretical work suggests that this binding process may manifest itself as temporal interactions among ensembles of neurons. Temporal interaction patterns such as correlated discharge among MI and SMA neurons will be examined when movement segments are performed together as a functional unit and compared with patterns occurring when the same segments are generated independently or in isolation. A number of movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease can be characterized as a breakdown in the generation of smooth movement sequences. Therefore, this research could provide insights into the etiology and treatment of such disorders.