Models of Thalamocortical Interactions in Motor Control

Abstract

Abstract The ever-increasing accumulation of experimental results from the thalamocortical system has driven improvements in theories and models of circuit mechanisms in motor control. In this chapter, the authors give a historical overview of the development of such theories, and propose a taxonomy for categorizing models into types according to 2 principal features: (1) whether they assume a representational or dynamical function for motor cortex, and (2) whether thalamus acts as a feedforward input to, or a bidirectional loop with, cortex. They show that technical advances in experimental and theoretical approaches have led to a conceptualization of the thalamocortical circuit as a mechanism for efficiently reconfiguring cortical dynamics. In this framework, context-specific thalamocortical loops can refine cortical computations to solve multiple tasks accurately and robustly. The chapter demonstrates that throughout the history of modeling in the thalamocortical circuit, mathematical insights have illuminated new theories and proposed new experiments.