Research

Cognitive Sciences and Psychology

Title :

Inferring neural correlates of motor planning and control from muscle recruitment activity

Area of research :

Cognitive Sciences and Psychology

Focus area :

Motor Planning, Neural Correlates

Principal Investigator :

Dr. Aditya Murthy, Indian Institute Of Science, Bangalore, Karnataka

Timeline Start Year :

2023

Timeline End Year :

2026

Contact info :

Details

Executive Summary :

This proposal aims to explore the non-invasive extraction of early muscle recruitment from humans performing reach and saccade tasks, their information conveying, and how they may be gated by task demands. The research is based on findings that motor recruitment patterns parallel aspects of motor planning observed in the oculomotor system, such as planning saccades and saccade sequences. The proposal aims to extend these results to humans performing head and hand movement tasks. Three specific aims will be pursued: 1) characterizing the recruitment pattern of individual motor units using high density surface EMG activity; 2) testing stochastic accumulation to threshold and race models that link motor recruitment patterns to movement initiation and control; and 3) using non-invasive neuro-stimulation to test the role of the prefrontal cortex in flexible sensorimotor gating of muscle activity recruitment. The research could potentially lead to the development of an assistive non-invasive brain machine interface that decodes intentional signals from motor unit activity before movement generation.

Total Budget (INR):

66,56,100

Organizations involved