Revealing unexpected mechanisms of complex encoding but simple decoding in motor cortex via task-relevant neural signal distillation

In motor cortex, behaviorally-relevant neural responses are entangled with irrelevant signals, which complicates the study of encoding and decoding mechanisms. It remains unclear whether behaviorally-irrelevant signals could conceal some critical truth. One solution is to accurately separate behaviorally-relevant and irrelevant signals at both single-neuron and single-trial levels, but this approach remains elusive due to the unknown ground truth of behaviorally-relevant signals. Therefore, we propose a framework to define, extract, and validate behaviorally-relevant signals. Analyzing separated signals in three monkeys performing different reaching tasks, we found neural responses previously considered to contain little information actually encode rich behavioral information in complex nonlinear ways. These responses are critical for neuronal redundancy and reveal movement behaviors occupy a higher-dimensional neural space than previously expected. Surprisingly, when incorporating often-ignored neural dimensions, behaviorally-relevant signals can be decoded linearly with comparable performance to nonlinear decoding, suggesting linear readout may be performed in motor cortex. Our findings prompt that separating behaviorally-relevant signals may help uncover more hidden cortical mechanisms.