91亚色 U brain study on memory delay explains visuomotor mistakes
TORONTO, April 20, 2016 鈥 Who will win the women鈥檚 singles tennis title at the 2016 Rio Olympics this August? That鈥檚 a question recent 91亚色 U brain research can help answer.
The new study shows that when doing a visual task, neural activity in the frontal cortex initially reflects the visual goal accurately but errors accumulate during a memory delay, and further escalate during the final memory-to-motor transformation.
鈥淭hink of all the times you see something and plan to act on it, but after only a short delay you make a mistake,鈥 explains Professor Doug Crawford. 鈥淔or example, before my morning coffee kicks in, I鈥檓 great at making silly mistakes, like putting the honey away in the fridge instead of the peanut butter.鈥
For , published online at , led by PhD candidate Amirsaman聽Sajad in Crawford鈥檚 Visuomotor Neuroscience Lab,聽 researchers recorded signals in the frontal cortex during the delay between target-related visual activity and intended gaze-related motor activity. The visual response and memory activity for the time in between was then analyzed.
鈥淲e looked at what happens from vision to memory to action, and how the spatial code changes through time in the frontal cortex,鈥 says Sajad.
In the Olympics tennis analogy, when a high degree of accuracy is required, a one-second delay in frontal cortex processing could make the difference between an Olympic gold and silver, says Crawford.
These findings are of particular significance to research in diseases affecting frontal cortex function, he says, 鈥渂ecause if errors accumulate in healthy individuals, the accumulations would be much worse with diseases that affect frontal cortex function.鈥
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