AI Article Synopsis
- Manual dexterity relies on proprioceptive feedback for hand movements, yet most research has focused on reaching rather than grasping.
- In this study, researchers recorded both hand movements and neural activity in monkeys as they grasped various objects, observing how the brain responds to these actions.
- Findings reveal that neurons in both the somatosensory and motor cortices are tuned to the changing postures of the hand during grasping, highlighting distinct neural mechanisms for hand movements compared to arm movements.
Article Abstract
Manual dexterity requires proprioceptive feedback about the state of the hand. To date, study of the neural basis of proprioception in the cortex has focused primarily on reaching movements to the exclusion of hand-specific behaviors such as grasping. To fill this gap, we record both time-varying hand kinematics and neural activity evoked in somatosensory and motor cortices as monkeys grasp a variety of objects. We find that neurons in the somatosensory cortex, as well as in the motor cortex, preferentially track time-varying postures of multi-joint combinations spanning the entire hand. This contrasts with neural responses during reaching movements, which preferentially track time-varying movement kinematics of the arm, such as velocity and speed of the limb, rather than its time-varying postural configuration. These results suggest different representations of arm and hand movements suited to the different functional roles of these two effectors.
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Source |
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7172114 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2019.09.004 | DOI Listing |
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