QBI Seminar: How the motor cortex represents body movements: a spatial dynamics model

Event Details

Date:

Tuesday, 27 October 2015 - Tuesday, 27 October 2015

Time:

12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Room:

QBI Level 7 Auditorium

UQ Location:

Queensland Brain Institute (St Lucia)

URL:

http://www.qbi.uq.edu.au/neuroscience-seminars

Event category(s):

Full Description:: A/Professor Hirokazu Tanaka
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Ishikawa 923-1292, Japan
Title: How the motor cortex represents body movements: a spatial dynamics model
Abstract:
Specialization of motor function in the frontal lobe was first discovered in the seminal experiments in the nineteenth century, but how the motor cortex represents body movements still remains unresolved.
Some studies suggest a low-level or dynamical representation in body-centered coordinates such as muscle contractions (the dynamical coding hypothesis), and other studies support an abstract-level or kinematical representation such as movement directions in spatial coordinates (the kinematical coding hypothesis). In this talk I demonstrate that the computation of body dynamics becomes simplified if a movement is represented in terms of spatial vectors and propose a computational model of the motor cortex based on spatial dynamics. The model naturally explains a wide variety of neurophysiological findings such as directional tuning and reference frames. The model also unifies the two hypotheses of motor cortex, so I conclude that the two hypotheses are not conflicting to each other but rather two sides of the same coin.