The long-term goals of this research is to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes of motor behavior. Experimental psychological studies, neurophysiological recordings, and modelling are pursued to achieve these goals. Psychological studies are carried out i both human subjects and rhesus monkeys. The tasks are cognitive in nature and are focused on paradigms of mental rotation and memory scanning. Electrophysiological recordings of the activity of single cells in motor and other areas of the cerebral cortex are then performed in monkeys behaving in these tasks in order to elucidate the brain mechanisms involved in mental rotation and memory scanning. This experimental arrangement provides for a direct study of the relations between neuronal populations and behavior. The activity in these neuronal populations is modelled in order to visualize the representation of spatial motor information and its transformations demanded by the tasks. Finally, information concerning synaptic interactions among neurons in a given area is obtained by using cross-correlation analyses of data recorded simultaneously from 7 independently movable microelectrodes.
| Merchant, Hugo; Crowe, David Andrew; Robertson, Melissa S et al. (2011) Top-down spatial categorization signal from prefrontal to posterior parietal cortex in the primate. Front Syst Neurosci 5:69 |
| Averbeck, Bruno B; Crowe, David A; Chafee, Matthew V et al. (2009) Differential contribution of superior parietal and dorsal-lateral prefrontal cortices in copying. Cortex 45:432-41 |
| Merchant, Hugo; Naselaris, Thomas; Georgopoulos, Apostolos P (2008) Dynamic sculpting of directional tuning in the primate motor cortex during three-dimensional reaching. J Neurosci 28:9164-72 |
| Crowe, David A; Averbeck, Bruno B; Chafee, Matthew V (2008) Neural ensemble decoding reveals a correlate of viewer- to object-centered spatial transformation in monkey parietal cortex. J Neurosci 28:5218-28 |
| Georgopoulos, Apostolos P; Karageorgiou, Elissaios (2008) Neurostatistics: applications, challenges and expectations. Stat Med 27:407-17 |
| Georgopoulos, Apostolos P; Stefanis, Costas N (2007) Local shaping of function in the motor cortex: motor contrast, directional tuning. Brain Res Rev 55:383-9 |
| Chafee, Matthew V; Averbeck, Bruno B; Crowe, David A (2007) Representing spatial relationships in posterior parietal cortex: single neurons code object-referenced position. Cereb Cortex 17:2914-32 |
| Georgopoulos, Apostolos P; Merchant, Hugo; Naselaris, Thomas et al. (2007) Mapping of the preferred direction in the motor cortex. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 104:11068-72 |
| Naselaris, Thomas; Merchant, Hugo; Amirikian, Bagrat et al. (2005) Spatial reconstruction of trajectories of an array of recording microelectrodes. J Neurophysiol 93:2318-30 |
| Chafee, Matthew V; Crowe, David A; Averbeck, Bruno B et al. (2005) Neural correlates of spatial judgement during object construction in parietal cortex. Cereb Cortex 15:1393-413 |
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