Parkinsonism disrupts the population-level organization of cortical dynamics

Abstract

Parkinsons disease (PD) is marked by impairments in voluntary movement, including prolonged movement preparation and execution, yet how parkinsonism alters neural processing to produce these deficits remains unresolved. Prior work examining M1 spiking activity in parkinsonian states has largely characterized firing-rate changes and motor representations at the level of individual neurons, with inconsistent results and limited insight into population-level organization. Here we investigated how parkinsonism reshapes the population-level organization of neural activity in M1 during movement. We simultaneously recorded large populations of neurons from M1 in two nonhuman primates performing reaching tasks before and after induction of parkinsonism with the neurotoxin 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP). In the parkinsonian state, both preparation and reach durations were significantly prolonged. Population-level analyses revealed that parkinsonism increased the dimensionality of M1 activity during both preparation and movement and reduced the orthogonality between preparatory and movement-related subspaces. Moreover, trial-by-trial variability in reach duration was explained by the alignment of the preparatory and reach subspaces, indicating the functional role of subspace orthogonality. Together, these findings suggest that parkinsonism disrupts the population-level organization of cortical dynamics across computations, providing a population-level framework linking altered cortical dynamics to the movement-related dysfunction observed in PD.