News Finding: The results showed that the subjects learned to generate some neural activity patterns more easily than others, since they only sometimes achieved accurate cursor movements.
Paper Finding: Permuting the units with larger modulation depths impacted the monkey's ability to proficiently control the cursor more than would permuting units with smaller modulation depths.
News Context: "It helps scientists study the dynamics of brain circuits that may explain the neural basis of learning." The results showed that the subjects learned to generate some neural activity patterns more easily than others, since they only sometimes achieved accurate cursor movements. The harder-to-learn patterns were different from any of the pre-existing patterns, whereas the easier-to-learn patterns were combinations of pre-existing brain patterns.
Paper Context: Due to computational constraints, we were unable to consider every possible g OM as a candidate perturbation. Permuting the units with larger modulation depths impacted the monkey's ability to proficiently control the cursor more than would permuting units with smaller modulation depths. This formed the set of candidate outside-manifold perturbations.