Ricerc@Sapienza

Our aim is to analyze the neural dynamics in primate brain, associated to complex visuomotor tasks, requiring action execution in different contexts or mere action observation. The cortical activity will be recorded from different areas of the fronto-parietal network (dorsal premotor and posterior parietal cortex) of the macaque brain, during the animal task performance. To this aims two macaques will be trained to perform identical isometric actions under different social contexts (individually or jointly with a mate), or to merely observe the motor output of the isometric action performed by a conspecific, consisting in a cursor's motion on a screen.

Neural processes at the population level, will be studied by making use mainly of a dimensionality-reduction technique (Principal Component Analysis) applied to the neuronal responses. Previous studies of neural population dynamics of cell activity from monkey motor areas during visuomotor task suggests that it mostly represents the generation and timing of motor behavior. Here will move a step forward, adding to this approach new behavioral contexts, to shed new light on dynamical features of neural processes subtending higher-order visuomotor behavior.