News Finding: We found that subjects were able to more readily recombine familiar activity patterns in new ways relative to creating entirely novel patterns."
Paper Finding: If that were the case, the angles between control spaces would have been zero, not in the range of 40-80u as shown.
News Context: "We found that the brain works in a similar way during learning. We found that subjects were able to more readily recombine familiar activity patterns in new ways relative to creating entirely novel patterns." "It helps scientists study the dynamics of brain circuits that may explain the neural basis of learning."
Paper Context: 3b also shows that the perturbations were not pure workspace rotations. If that were the case, the angles between control spaces would have been zero, not in the range of 40-80u as shown. If learning one type of perturbation required larger changes in preferred directions of neural units, then those perturbations might be harder to learn.