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Brain Representations Of Dexterous Hand Control: Investigating The Functional Organization Of Individuated Finger Movements And Somatosensory Integration, Spencer Arbuckle
Brain Representations Of Dexterous Hand Control: Investigating The Functional Organization Of Individuated Finger Movements And Somatosensory Integration, Spencer Arbuckle
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Using our hands to manipulate objects in our daily life requires both dexterous movements and the integration of somatosensory information across fingers. Although the primary motor (M1) and somatosensory cortices (S1) are critical for these two complementary roles, it is unclear how neural populations in these regions functionally represent these processes. This thesis examined the functional organization of brain representations (the representational geometry) in M1 and S1 for dexterous hand control and somatosensory processing. To that end, representational geometries were estimated from fine-grained brain activity patterns measured with functional MRI (fMRI). Since fMRI measures a blood-based proxy of neural activity, …
Brain Signatures Of Human Skill Learning: From Single Movements To Movement Sequences, Eva Berlot
Brain Signatures Of Human Skill Learning: From Single Movements To Movement Sequences, Eva Berlot
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Sequences of finger movements, such as making a cup of coffee or playing the piano, have a key role in our lives. An important neuroscientific question is how such movement sequences are represented in the brain. The central goal of this thesis was to investigate how different brain regions represent individual movements, and how these representations change when learning sequences of movements. To that end, we used 1) high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activation in humans while they produced finger movements on a keyboard-like device, and 2) advanced multivariate analyses to characterize the brain representations underlying …