Optimal control of ballistic movements in a thalamo-cortical circuit model

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Guillaume Hennequin, University of Cambridge
• Thursday 18 October 2018, 14:00-15:00
• Cambridge University Engineering Department, Lecture Room 4.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Alberto Padoan.

How does the brain control movement? Experiments suggest that the (pre-)motor cortex behaves like an “engine” whose dynamics drive movement, and whose activity must first be initialised into movement-specific states (“the optimal subspace hypothesis”, Shenoy & al, 2013). Both the computational and mechanistic underpinnings of this preparatory process remain poorly understood. Here, we propose a circuit model for movement preparation and execution. We formalise movement preparation as an optimal control problem, and compute the preparatory input to cortex that drives fastest convergence to preparatory states predicted to yield the correct motor outcomes. Critically, we show that optimal control inputs can be realised via feedback in realistic, thalamo-cortical neural circuit architectures, and that multiple control loops can be flexibly combined to generate movements composed of a few primitives. The model produces naturalistic patterns of preparatory activity, and accounts for across-trial variability suppression as well as orthogonality between preparatory and movement-related activity subspaces.

This talk is part of the CUED Control Group Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• CUED Control Group Seminars
• Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3)
• Cambridge University Engineering Department Talks
• Cambridge University Engineering Department, Lecture Room 4
• Cambridge talks
• Centre for Smart Infrastructure & Construction
• Chris Davis' list
• Computational Continuum Mechanics Group Seminars
• Featured lists
• Information Engineering Division seminar list
• Interested Talks
• School of Technology
• Signal Processing and Communications Lab Seminars
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31
• ndk22's list
• ob366-ai4er
• rp587

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.