Neural representations for multi-context visuomotor adaptation and the impact of common representation on multi-task performance: a multivariate decoding approach

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

Human Neuroscience

Youngjo Song¹  Pyeongsoo Kim¹  Wooree Shin²  Jaeseung Jeong³ 

[1] Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, College of Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea;Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, College of Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea;Program of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, College of Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea;Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, College of Life Science and Bioengineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea;

关键词: context representation;    sensorimotor adaptation;    multi-task;    structural learning;    shared representation;    meta-learning;    multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA);   

DOI  :  10.3389/fnhum.2023.1221944

 received in 2023-05-17, accepted in 2023-08-30,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The human brain's remarkable motor adaptability stems from the formation of context representations and the use of a common context representation (e.g., an invariant task structure across task contexts) derived from structural learning. However, direct evaluation of context representations and structural learning in sensorimotor tasks remains limited. This study aimed to rigorously distinguish neural representations of visual, movement, and context levels crucial for multi-context visuomotor adaptation and investigate the association between representation commonality across task contexts and adaptation performance using multivariate decoding analysis with fMRI data. Here, we focused on three distinct task contexts, two of which share a rotation structure (i.e., visuomotor rotation contexts with −90° and +90° rotations, in which the mouse cursor's movement was rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise and clockwise relative to the hand-movement direction, respectively) and the remaining one does not (i.e., mirror-reversal context where the horizontal movement of the computer mouse was inverted). This study found that visual representations (i.e., visual direction) were decoded in the occipital area, while movement representations (i.e., hand-movement direction) were decoded across various visuomotor-related regions. These findings are consistent with prior research and the widely recognized roles of those areas. Task-context representations (i.e., either −90° rotation, +90° rotation, or mirror-reversal) were also distinguishable in various brain regions. Notably, these regions largely overlapped with those encoding visual and movement representations. This overlap suggests a potential intricate dependency of encoding visual and movement directions on the context information. Moreover, we discovered that higher task performance is associated with task-context representation commonality, as evidenced by negative correlations between task performance and task-context-decoding accuracy in various brain regions, potentially supporting structural learning. Importantly, despite limited similarities between tasks (e.g., rotation and mirror-reversal contexts), such association was still observed, suggesting an efficient mechanism in the brain that extracts commonalities from different task contexts (such as visuomotor rotations or mirror-reversal) at multiple structural levels, from high-level abstractions to lower-level details. In summary, while illuminating the intricate interplay between visuomotor processing and context information, our study highlights the efficiency of learning mechanisms, thereby paving the way for future exploration of the brain's versatile motor ability.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Song, Shin, Kim and Jeong.