Electrophysiology and Behavioral Task

The data analyzed included all 82 trials. Out of the 79 successful trials, there were 35 where the monkey had to move the cursor to the upper-right target, and 44 where the monkey had to move the cursor to the upper-left target. The data analyzed lasted from the start of each trial to the end of movement of that trial; thus, all inter-trial periods were ignored. Planning of sequential arm movements from simultaneously recorded motor cortical neurons. Society for Neuroscience Abstract 23:1400. 8 However, as mentioned in the introduction, the mere existence of structure by no means implies that this structure is actually used by the brain for the purpose of information coding, let alone as a binding mechanism. We are still a long way from such a conclusion and the analysis we conducted so far has not revealed any correlation between the patterns found and behavior. Of course the general issue of time scales may very much depend on which part of the nervous system is under consideration. It should also be stressed that we have explored only a small fraction of what may be considered reasonable candidate statistics S(T). Further work will depend, to a large extent, on the development of eecient search techniques. These will be necessary if the space of statistics is extended and/or if one wishes to analyze the activity of, say, 100 simultaneously recorded neurons. for neuronal activity in SMA) of a monkey performing a delayed sequential task were recorded using a chronically implanted 10 10-grid multi-electrode array developed at the University of Utah (Nordhausen, 1996). a b c Start Trial Pre Cue Go Cue Figure 3: Random spike movements (spike jittering), a, original spike record b,c, jittered spike records. During the task, the monkey used a horizontal two-joint manipulandum to move a cursor presented on a video monitor in front of him. Each trial started with the appearance of 9 white squares, with the bottom center square blinking (See Fig.3 a). After the monkey held the cursor on the bottom center position (\start position") for 500 ms, three targets (green) were presented (Fig.3 b), two of which were at xed locations (bottom center and center) and the third at one of two possible locations (upper left or upper right). The monkey was trained to maintain the cursor at the start position until the go cue (all of the square cursors blinking simultaneously) was …