Evidence against a single coordinate system representation in the motor cortex

Understanding the coordinate systems in which the motor cortical cells encode movement parameters such as direction is a fundamental yet unresolved issue. Although many studies have assumed that motor cortex encodes direction in an extrinsic, Cartesian (CA) coordinate system, other studies have provided evidence for encoding in intermediate coordinate systems such as a shoulder-centered (SC) or in a purely intrinsic, joint-angle-based (JA) coordinate frame. By simultaneously recording from multiple single units in primary motor cortex, we examined movement direction encoding under each of these three coordinate systems. We directly compared the degree of directional tuning invariance over multiple sub-regions in the workspace. We also compared the mutual information between neuronal firing rate and movement direction in the three systems. We observed a broad range of directional invariance in all three coordinate systems with no strong dominance of any single coordinate system. The mutual information analyses corroborated this observation. However, we found a small but significant bias toward the SC coordinate frame, which was also supported by population vector decoding. Similar results were found when we compared hand/torque force direction encoding in all three coordinate systems. These results suggest that the motor cortex employs a coordinate system that is yet to be discovered or perhaps that the motor cortex should not be viewed as a substrate for any coordinate system representation.