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Normalization by Valence and Motivational Intensity in the Primary Sensorimotor Cortices (PMd, M1 and S1)

Our brain’s ability to represent vast amounts of information, such as continuous ranges of reward spanning orders of magnitude, with limited dynamic range neurons, may be possible due to normalization. Recently our group and others have shown that the sensorimotor cortices are sensitive to reward value. In order to determine if normalization plays a role in the sensorimotor cortices when considering non-sensorimotor variables, such as valence and motivational intensity, we had two non-human primate (NHP) subjects (one male bonnet macaque and one female rhesus macaque) make cued grip-force movements while simultaneously cueing the level of possible reward if successful, or time-out punishment if unsuccessful. We recorded simultaneously from 96 electrodes in each the somatosensory, motor and dorsal premotor cortices (S1, M1, PMd). We utilized several normalization models for valence, and motivational intensity in all three regions. We found three types of divisive normalized relationships between neural activity and the representation of reward and punishment, linear, sigmodal and hyperbolic. The hyperbolic relationships resemble receptive fields in psychological affect space, where a unit is particularly sensitive to a small range of the valence/motivational space. We found that these cortical regions have both strong valence and motivational intensity representations. Significance Statement Brain machine interfaces (BMIs) are likely to make their way into the clinical setting in the future. Increasing stability of brain derived control of such BMI systems is one essential aspect towards user acceptance, and stability must be maintained no matter the emotional state of the user. However, it is well known that we move faster for rewards of higher magnitude, indicating that emotions influence the motor control system, where BMI control signals come from. Here we report widespread affective modulation of the sensorimotor regions (PMd, PMv, M1 and S1) by cued levels of possible reward if successful and time-out punishment if unsuccessful in non-human primates, and that affect divisively normalizes these regions activity.