This project focuses upon patterns of human brain activation in the frontal and parietal lobe related to continuous movement tracking and motor learning. We will employ a multimodal neuroimaging approach that integrates anatomic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional MRI, magnetoencephalography (MEG), and electroencephalography (EEG) to improve spatial and temporal resolution of non-invasive imaging in humans. The improved technology will help unravel unanswered issues of brain mechanisms of movement and motor learning. Neuroanatomy and neurophysiology studies have revealed an interconnected frontal-parietal lobe network underlying visual-to-motor coordinate transformations; this network also contributes to motor learning. While frontal and parietal structures of humans do exhibit movement and learning related activation patterns, the spatial and temporal resolution of these patterns and how these areas interact during performance and learning remains incompletely specified. Additionally, the nature of movement encoding from functional neuroimaging methods has not been clearly resolved. With time-resolved functional MRI and combined M/EEG recordings, we will investigate the encoding of continuous tracking movements in the frontal and parietal lobes of humans. We will construct motor receptive fields in these brain regions to characterize the activation pattern related to movement position, velocity, and force. An initial series of experiments will examine differences of the motor fields across these brain regions and will determine whether shifts in motor task requirements induce shifts in the motor fields. Next, we will determine whether fundamental shifts in how the movements are guided - by sensory input or memory - also modify the representation of movement variables in frontal and parietal lobes. Finally, we will assess how motor fields and functional coupling of frontal and parietal lobes shift in response to motor learning and memory retrieval. The experiments will demonstrate the extent to which shifts in movement requirements and motor learning modify neural representations for voluntary movements. Application of the multimodal results should enhance the capability to resolve time varying changes in human brain activation and coupling between brain areas.
| Bédard, Patrick; Sanes, Jerome N (2009) On a basal ganglia role in learning and rehearsing visual-motor associations. Neuroimage 47:1701-10 |
| Philip, Benjamin A; Wu, Yanchun; Donoghue, John P et al. (2008) Performance differences in visually and internally guided continuous manual tracking movements. Exp Brain Res 190:475-91 |
| Kim, Jennifer A; Eliassen, James C; Sanes, Jerome N (2005) Movement quantity and frequency coding in human motor areas. J Neurophysiol 94:2504-11 |
| Sanes, Jerome N (2003) Neocortical mechanisms in motor learning. Curr Opin Neurobiol 13:225-31 |
