Dr. Ronald Kettner will study two basic questions: 1) how dofrontal cortical areas control rapid arm movements to a sequenceof targets in space; and 2) how are these sequences stored inshort.term memory during a delay period before movementinitiation? His basic approach will be to record from singleneurons in the frontal cortex of well.trained rhesus monkeysperforming a simple arm movement task. The data he collectsalong with previously collected data will allow Dr. Kettner todevelop and test mathematical models of frontal corticalfunction. This work is important because it will give us abetter and more detailed understanding of how arm movements aregenerated from cortical initiation.
