There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
<p id="P1">Neural mechanisms that support flexible sensorimotor computations are not
well understood.
In a dynamical system whose state is determined by interactions among neurons, computations
can be rapidly reconfigured by controlling the system’s inputs and initial conditions.
To investigate whether the brain employs such control mechanisms, we recorded from
the dorsomedial frontal cortex of monkeys trained to measure and produce time intervals
in two sensorimotor contexts. The geometry of neural trajectories during the production
epoch was consistent with a mechanism wherein the measured interval and sensorimotor
context exerted control over the cortical dynamics by adjusting the system’s initial
condition and input, respectively. These adjustments, in turn, set the speed at which
activity evolved in the production epoch allowing the animal to flexibly produce different
time intervals. These results provide evidence that the language of dynamical systems
can be used to parsimoniously link brain activity to sensorimotor computations.
</p><p id="P2">Remington et al. employ a dynamical systems perspective to understand
how the brain
flexibly controls timed movements. Results suggest that neurons in frontal cortex
form a recurrent network whose behavior is flexibly controlled by inputs and initial
conditions.
</p><p id="P3">
<div class="figure-container so-text-align-c">
<img alt="" class="figure" src="/document_file/4dab60f7-9c6a-4dcd-a781-4f8ccdefd0bf/PubMedCentral/image/nihms972922u1.jpg"/>
</div>
</p>