News Finding: "It helps scientists study the dynamics of brain circuits that may explain the neural basis of learning."
Paper Finding: These results support our hypothesis that the structure of a network determines which patterns of neural activity (and corresponding behaviours) a subject can readily learn to generate.
News Context: 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." 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 Context: 2) , indicating that it was difficult to learn to generate new co-modulation patterns, even when those patterns would have led to improved performance in the task. These results support our hypothesis that the structure of a network determines which patterns of neural activity (and corresponding behaviours) a subject can readily learn to generate. Two additional lines of evidence show that BCI control was more learnable when using within-manifold perturbations than outside-manifold perturbations.