Fig. 5: State-dependent directional tuning of MC neurons.
From: Human motor cortex encodes complex handwriting through a sequence of stable neural states
a, Normalized firing rates over directions with both simple- and complex-tuning neurons, sorted based on state 1. The simple-tuning neurons show more consistent directional tuning over states compared with the complex-tuning neurons. b, Directional tuning curve of two exemplar simple-tuning neurons estimated using a state-independent model (black) or a state-dependent model (magenta). For the state-dependent model, a tuning curve is estimated based on each state and the tuning curves have a consistent preferred direction (PD) across states but the modulation depth (MD) varies across states. Darker colour for curves with higher R2. c, Similar to b, but for complex-tuning neurons that exhibit variable directional tuning under different states. d,e, Statistical analysis of PD (d) and MD (e) for simple- and complex-tuning neurons. The standard deviation of PD is significantly higher for complex-tuning neurons (mean = 0.57, n = 115) than simple-tuning neurons (mean = 0.30, n = 64) (unpaired two-tailed Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, D(64,115) = 0.628, P = 1.97 × 10−20 (d); unpaired two-tailed Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, D(64,115) = 0.200, P = 0.063 (e)) Source data.
