Rotational dynamics versus sequence-like responses

Abstract

In a recent review, Vyas et al. commented on our previous observations regarding the presence of response sequences in the activity of cortical neuronal population and the contribution of such sequences to rotational dynamics patterns revealed with jPCA. Vyas et al. suggested that rotations generated from sequence-like responses are different from the ones arising from empirical neuronal patterns, which are highly heterogeneous across motor conditions in terms of response timing and shape. Here we extend our previous findings with new results showing that empirical population data contain plentiful neuronal responses whose shape and timing persist across arm-movement conditions. The more complex, heterogeneous responses can be also found; these response patterns also contain temporal sequences, which are evident from the analysis of cross-condition variance. Combined with simulation results, these observations show that both consistent and heterogeneous responses contribute to rotational patterns revealed with jPCA. We suggest that the users of jPCA should consider these two contributions when interpreting their results. Overall, we do not see any principal contradiction between the neural population dynamics framework and our results pertaining to sequence-like responses. Yet, questions remain regarding the conclusions that can be drawn from the analysis of low-dimensional representations of neuronal population data.