How neuronal networks accomplish motor learning

How does a student driver acquire the sensory/motor associations necessary to execute the actions needed to stop for a red light, proceed at a green light, and begin to slow down (or is it speed up?) when the light is yellow? Monitoring patterns of neuronal activity while primates perform tasks similar to these that require motor learning is a model for studying how information is integrated across multiple brain systems, e.g., sensory motor integration.

To date such studies have been hampered by technical limitations. The necessary experiments require awake primates and electrode arrays capable of simultaneously recording electrical activity from large numbers of neurons in multiple brain sites, over a relatively long learning period. Moreover, interpreting the highly complex data sets that result from such experiments requires new computational and statistical tools. This collaborative plans to overcome these limitations. The researchers hope to determine how large networks of neurons interact to mediate the perceptual, motor, and cognitive mechanisms that underly basic problem-solving strategies primates use in daily life.