Conserved structures of neural activity in sensorimotor cortex of freely moving rats allow cross-subject decoding.
Electrophysiological recordings across the entire bilateral sensorimotor cortex allow claims about the respective contributions of premotor, motor, and sensory areas. Specifically, the authors found a clear gradient for a contralateral bias from anterior to posterior regions.
With recordings in freely moving subjects via 3D tracking the authors tackle the issue of transferability of our knowledge about sensorimotor cortex from constrained behaviour to a freely moving condition, a prerequisite to understand the brain under more naturalistic conditions as well as to advance neuroprosthetic devices.
Via a simple dimensionality reduction and alignment procedure on neuronal data, Melbaum et al. were able to decode behavioural categories across recording sessions and even across subjects. This points towards conserved structures of neuronal activity.
The full article is available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35115-6.pdf