[CCoE Notice] dissertation announcement for Jaganth Nivas Asok Kumar

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[Dissertation Defense Announcement at the Cullen College of Engineering]

Influence of Reward on the correlations within and between the sensorimotor cortices



Jaganth Nivas Asok Kumar

April 29, 2022; 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM (CST)

Zoom: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://uh-edu-cougarnet.zoom.us/j/94045660404?pwd=N0F2dmFSN2tXTGw1VC9wZmxWZURKUT09__;!!LkSTlj0I!GW-KuTvTw1CMLPtdtA2nLnMj4_6iq8QvpixhjEeJT6fYNNWeYENG20m0Gwh5bGoOHiOlqu_FHaBVrgS5LWGiL5pCi2k$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.google.com/url?q=https:**Auh-edu-cougarnet.zoom.us*j*94045660404*pwd*3DN0F2dmFSN2tXTGw1VC9wZmxWZURKUT09&sa=D&source=hangouts&ust=1650740145886000&usg=AOvVaw301Nhv9XVEp0j4edyrqmpT__;Ly8vLz8l!!LkSTlj0I!EMoazseIKx_6oMwEPe6N6KS9kCTGpO2GZMd4b1_AfUX0gNmIeXuVUBuvg08kwkJWwwiS2BA6oDY_7sziTUBStQ$>

Committee Chair:
Joseph T. Francis, Ph.D.

Committee Members:
Nuri Ince, Ph.D. | Yingchun Zhang , Ph.D. | Jinsook Roh, Ph.D. | David Francis, Ph.D.

Abstract

Reward is the primary drive behind any action and the brain plays a crucial role in the generation of action/movement. Although there are brain regions implicated in movement, it is now well established that a brain region rarely acts in isolation and that most functions of the nervous system are achieved by an interaction within and between neurons in different brain regions. However, the link between reward and how it affects the interaction between brain areas is still unclear. The primary goal of this thesis is to study the influence of reward on the correlations within and between the sensorimotor cortices which are the Primary Motor Cortex (M1), Primary Somatosensory Cortex(S1) and the dorsal Premotor Cortex (PMd). To this end, the first aim of this work was to analyze the effect of reward on the neuronal pairwise noise correlation structure, which is a linear measure of similarity between two neurons. The second aim was to analyze the effect of reward on the temporal evolution of neural activity across the sensorimotor regions using Granger Causality. The results from this research reveal that there are significant differences in the distribution of pairwise correlations as well as optimal temporal lags for inter region neural activity prediction, within and across all three regions of the sensorimotor cortices based on the level of reward and that this difference varies depending on other factors such as whether the subject observes the task or performs the task. These findings help to better understand the distributed processing of reward in the sensorimotor cortices.

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