| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
SHIMA Keisetsu Tohoku Univ., Sch.Med.Dept.Physiol., Research Associate, 大学院・医学系研究科, 助手 (60124583)
MUSHIAKE Hajime Tohoku Univ., Sch.Med.Dept.Physiol., Associate Professor, 大学院・医学系研究科, 助教授 (80219849)
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| Research Abstract |
We performed a series of experiments to investigate participation of prefrontal cortex and premotor areas as planned, and then carried out additional sets of experiments to extend our originally planned study. All studies turned out to be successful, yielding findings and results that were published as scientific papers. Starting from our findings that medial frontal motor areas, presupplementary motor and supplementary motor areas, are critically involved in organizing temporal sequence of multiple movements, we analyzed cellular activity in these areas. We found that the supplementary motor area includes cells that are acting to link events in a time series, whereas cells in the presupplementary motor area express the rank order of movements to be performed, and also signify up-dating of forthcoming sequences. We subsequently analyzed cellular activity in the prefrontal cortex to clarify its role on integrating information stored in memory (past information), currently available sensory information (present information), and the nature of forthcoming movement (future information). We found that cellular activity expressing the past and present information are integrated to produce the future information inside the prefrontal cortex. Furthermore, we conducted experiments to reveal the role of premotor cortex in planning the spatial target and the body part to be used for a forthcoming target-reaching movement. We found cellular activity that reflect the process of integrating spatial-target and body-part information necessary to plan future movements.
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