Flexible integration of corollary discharge and sensory feedback signals in somatosensory cortex

Abstract

Motor control depends on the continuous integration of motor and sensory signals to maintain accurate estimates of body state, yet neural evidence for this integration remains elusive. Here, we investigated the interaction of motor corollary discharge and proprioceptive feedback signals in area 2 of monkey somatosensory cortex during voluntary and externally-perturbed reaching tasks. Though single neurons had mixed responses to corollary discharge and sensory feedback, we disentangled these signals at the population level to discover they occupy approximately orthogonal subspaces. Integrating information across these subspaces enabled accurate body state estimation prior to feedback arrival during voluntary movements. Moreover, the orthogonal population geometry of corollary discharge and sensory feedback enabled cancellation of movement-related signals to improve the decoding of external perturbations. Together, these results identified orthogonality as a population-level coding strategy for flexible integration of motor and sensory signals to support multiple distinct computations.