The human auditory cortex is engaged in monitoring the speech of interlocutors as well as self-generated speech. During vocalization, auditory cortex activity is reported to be suppressed, an effect often attributed to the influence of an efference copy from motor cortex. Single-unit studies in non-human primates have demonstrated a rich dynamic range of single-trial auditory responses to self-...

A pursuit-tracking task (PTT) and multielectrode recordings were used to investigate the spatiotemporal encoding of hand position and velocity in primate primary motor cortex (MI). Continuous tracking of a randomly moving visual stimulus provided a broad sample of velocity and position space, reduced statistical dependencies between kinematic variables, and minimized the nonstationarities that ...

A central theme of systems neuroscience is to characterize the tuning of neural responses to sensory stimuli or the production of movement. Statistically, we often want to estimate the parameters of the tuning curve, such as preferred direction, as well as the associated degree of uncertainty, characterized by error bars. Here we present a new sampling-based, Bayesian method that allows the est...

In the human motor cortex structural and functional differences separate motor areas related to motor output from areas essentially involved in higher-order motor control. Little is known about the function of these higher-order motor areas during simple voluntary movement. We examined a simple finger flexion movement in six healthy subjects using a novel brain-imaging approach, integrating hig...

It has been recently demonstrated that visually guided saccades are linked to changes in muscle excitability in the relaxed upper limb, which are compatible with a covert motor plan encoding a hand movement toward the gaze target. In this study we investigated whether these excitability changes are time locked to the visual stimulus, as predicted by influential attention models, or are strictly...

In this study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine differences in recruited brain regions during the concentric and the eccentric phase of an imagined maximum resistance training task of the elbow flexors in healthy young subjects. The results showed that during the eccentric phase, pre-frontal cortex (BA44) bilaterally was recruited when contrasted to the concentric ...

Spontaneous activity in the resting human brain has been studied extensively; however, how such activity affects the local processing of a sensory stimulus is relatively unknown. Here, we examined the impact of spontaneous activity in primary visual cortex on neuronal and behavioural responses to a simple visual stimulus, using functional MRI. Stimulus-evoked responses remained essentially unch...

Spontaneous activity in the resting human brain has been studied extensively; however, how such activity affects the local processing of a sensory stimulus is relatively unknown. Here, we examined the impact of spontaneous activity in primary visual cortex on neuronal and behavioural responses to a simple visual stimulus, using functional MRI. Stimulus-evoked responses remained essentially unch...

The single-unit activity of 831 cells was recorded in the arm area of the motor cortex of two monkeys while the monkeys intercepted a moving visual stimulus (interception task) or remained immobile during presentation of the same moving stimulus (no-go task). The moving target traveled on an oblique path from either lower corner of a screen toward the vertical meridian, and its movement time (0...

How are neurons distributed along the cortical surface and across functional areas? Here we use the isotropic fractionator (Herculano-Houzel and Lent, 2005) to analyze the distribution of neurons across the entire isocortex of the mouse, divided into 18 functional areas defined anatomically. We find that the number of neurons underneath a surface area (the N/A ratio) varies 4.5-fold across func...