Abstract
Neural activity in motor cortical areas is well-explained by latent neural population dynamics: the motor preparation phase sets the initial condition for the movement while the dynamics that unfold during the motor execution phase orchestrate the sequence of muscle activations. While preparatory activity explains a large fraction of both neural and behavior variability during the execution of a planned movement, it cannot account for corrections and adjustments during movements as this requires sensory feedback not available during planning. Therefore, accounting for unplanned, sensory-guided movement requires knowledge of relevant inputs to the motor cortex from other brain areas. Here, we provide evidence that these inputs cause transient deviations from an autonomous neural population trajectory, and show that these dynamics cannot be found by unsupervised inference methods. We introduce the new Behavior-Aligned Neural Dynamics (BAND) model, which exploits semi-supervised learning to predict both planned and unplanned movements from neural activity in the motor cortex that can be missed by unsupervised inference methods. Our analysis using BAND suggests that 1) transient motor corrections are encoded in small neural variability; 2) motor corrections are encoded in a sparse sub-population of primary motor cortex neurons (M1); and 3) combining latent dynamical modeling with behavior supervision allows for capturing both the movement plan and corrections.