Ricerc@Sapienza

How neurons coordinate their collective activity for behavioural control is an open question in neuroscience. Several studies have progressively proved, at different scales, that the patterns of neural synchronization change accordingly with behavioural events. However, the topological features of neural dynamics that underlie task-based cognitive decisions at the microscale level are yet not deeply understood. With this research we want to give a contribution to this topic investigating the local functional connectivity of dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) of rhesus monkeys during a countermanding reaching task. Our goal is to investigate collective modulation of neuronal activities by going beyond the standard techniques of analysis commonly used in neurophysiology. More specifically we propose to analyse data with analytic techniques derived from graph theory and statistical physics and algorithms from complex network theory, rarely used in animal models data and even more in data recorded at the miscroscopic scale.