Journal club 11/5

We talked about two journals in journal club today. The first paper was authored by Andrew Schwartz, he is currently a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, doing motor control and neural prothetics. His paper smartly proposed that each single neuron has vecterial behavior. The action of population of motor cortical neurons can predict the movement direction by doing vecter summation of weighted each neuron's preferred direction. The weighting behavior was modeled by a simple cosine equation.

The other paper studied the muscle and movement representations in the primary motor cortex. They found that there are different groups of neurons in the motor cortex, and they hypothesized them as muscle-like, extrinsic neurons and others. For muscle-like neurons, the neuron firing rate is highly correlated with the muscle contraction, while for extrinsic-like neurons, the target locations which determines the movement illustrate are highly correlated with the firing rate. In addition, there are other neurons not included in these two categories. They didn't talk about them at all.

These are two easy papers, and I am going to continue to report what I learned from journal club and classes in the future, and meanwhile, my naive comment will be added.