Extracting Dynamical Structure Embedded in Neural Activity

Spiking activity from neurophysiological experiments often exhibits dynamics beyond that driven by external stimulation, presumably reflecting the extensive recurrence of neural circuitry. Characterizing these dynamics may reveal important features of neural computation, particularly during internally-driven cognitive operations. For example, the activity of premotor cortex (PMd) neurons during an instructed delay period separating movement-target specification and a movementinitiation cue is believed to be involved in motor planning. We show that the dynamics underlying this activity can be captured by a lowdimensional non-linear dynamical systems model, with underlying recurrent structure and stochastic point-process output. We present and validate latent variable methods that simultaneously estimate the system parameters and the trial-by-trial dynamical trajectories. These methods are applied to characterize the dynamics in PMd data recorded from a chronically-implanted 96-electrode array while monkeys perform delayed-reach tasks.