Connecting Brains with Machines The Neural Control of 2D Cursor Movement M. J. Black, E. Bienenstock, J.P. Donoghue, M. Serruya, Wei Wu; Yun Gao, Proceedings of the First International IEEE EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering, pp , Mar

Neural Control of 2D Movement

Firing rate vs. velocity Firing rate roughly relative to speed Rough cosine dependence to preferred angle of motion Zc = h3 + hx vx + hy vy

Firing rate vs. velocity Measured Speed vs. DirectionBest Linear Model

Firing rate vs. position At a slower time scale (1.4 second vs. 70 ms for position), firing rate is also proportional to position.

Firing rate vs. position Measured positionBest Linear Model

General Linear Model Zk = Hxk + qk Z = vector of firing rates of sampled cells xk = x6 matrix (x,y position, velocity, accel) H = matrix of coefficients relating each cell’s firing rate to these 6 properties. Kalman filter trained with 3.5 minutes of data

Model performance (Kalman filter)