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Modular premotor drives and unit bursts as primitives for frog motor behaviors
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Modular premotor drives and unit bursts as primitives for frog motor behaviors

Corey B Hart and Simon F Giszter
The Journal of neuroscience, v 24(22), pp 5269-5282
02 Jun 2004
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5626-03.2004
PMID: 15175397
url
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5626-03.2004View
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Abstract

Rana catesbeiana - physiology Decerebrate State - physiopathology Motor Activity - physiology Reflex - physiology Synaptic Transmission - physiology Hindlimb - physiology Behavior, Animal - physiology Muscle, Skeletal - innervation Electrodes, Implanted Statistics as Topic Muscle, Skeletal - physiology Brain Stem - physiology Axotomy Animals Spinal Cord - physiology Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted Electromyography
Spinal cord modularity impacts on our understanding of reflexes, development, descending systems in normal motor control, and recovery from injury. We used independent component analysis and best-basis or matching pursuit wavepacket analysis to extract the composition and temporal structure of bursts in hindlimb muscles of frogs. These techniques make minimal a priori assumptions about drive and motor pattern structure. We compared premotor drive and burst structures in spinal frogs with less reduced frogs with a fuller repertoire of locomotory, kicking, and scratching behaviors. Six multimuscle drives explain most of the variance of motor patterns (approximately 80%). Each extracted drive was activated with pulses at a single time scale or common duration (approximately 275 msec) burst structure. The data show that complex behaviors in brainstem frogs arise as a result of focusing drives to smaller core groups of muscles. Brainstem drives were subsets of the muscle groups from spinal frogs. The 275 msec burst duration was preserved across all behaviors and was most precise in brainstem frogs. These data support a modular decomposition of frog behaviors into a small collection of unit burst generators and associated muscle drives in spinal cord. Our data also show that the modular organization of drives seen in isolated spinal cord is fine-tuned by descending controls to enable a fuller movement repertoire. The unit burst generators and their associated muscle synergies extracted here link the biomechanical "primitives," described earlier in the frog, rat, and cat, and to the elements of pattern generation examined in fictive preparations.

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