The Neural Basis of Motor Skills on the Timescale of Movement.

Motor skills are critical to the evolutionary success of many mammalian species. Movement-related activity is observed in an array of brain regions that form the motor system, but how these regions conspire to drive skilled movement remains unresolved. Work in my new laboratory at Northwestern melds an array of genetic, physiological and computational methods to confront this ambiguity. Our goal is to understand motor skill generation in terms of interactions between motor system regions that transpire in real time. Here I propose a novel, behavior-centric approach to clarify motor system operation during a model skilled movement.