Motor cortex articles from across Nature Portfolio

In Parkinson’s disease, dopamine intake strengthens cortico-muscular connectivity, enhancing step-timing gait coordination, probably due to sensory-motor integration improvement.

Understanding the link between multiple movement elements and sequence-related responses in the motor cortex remains elusive. This study reveals a multiplicative joint coding mechanism during motor preparation which transfers to additive during execution, potentially explaining the linear readout of elemental movements.

Handedness is thought to be associated with brain asymmetry. Here, the authors show distinct brain functional connectivity associated with left- vs. right-handed children, shedding light on early neural organization and its relationship with handedness.

How does motor-cortex activity well before movement not drive motor outputs? In this Review, Churchland and Shenoy detail how searching for answers transitioned the understanding of neural activity during movement from single-neuron tuning towards population-level factors and revealed an essential computational role of output-null factors.

Two papers report the development of high performance brain–computer interfaces that can decode speech from cortical activity.

Neuronal activity in the secondary motor cortex of mice engaged in a foraging task simultaneously represents multiple alternative decision-making strategies.

In their flagship paper, the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network (BICCN) describes the classification and analysis of cell types in the mammalian primary motor cortex.

Two papers published in June 2021 used a two-photon microscope or one-photon miniature microscope to interrogate the motor cortex in behaving macaque monkeys. The imaging was performed over several months, and the direction of natural arm reaching was decoded from the population activity.

Activity in different parts of the mouse striatum is faithfully predicted by topographically connected areas of cortex.