News Finding: "We found that the brain works in a similar way during learning.
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: Understanding the ways in which the brain's activity can be "flexed" during learning could eventually be used to develop better treatments for stroke and other brain injuries. "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."
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.