Predicting measures of motor performance from multiple cortical spike trains.

Recordings have been obtained simultaneously from several, individually selected neurons in the motor cortex of unanesthetized monkey as the animal performed simple arm movements. With the use of comparatively simple quantitative procedures, the activity of small sets of cells was found to be adequate for rather accurate real-time prediction of the time course of various response measurements. In addition, the results suggest that hypotheses concerning the response variables "controlled" by cortical motor systems may well depend upon whether or not the temporal relations between simultaneously active neurons are taken into account.