Cortical Action Representations

The organization of the motor cortex has been studied and debated for more than 130 years. Although it contains a map of the body, the map is overlapping and fractured, and therefore, additional principles of organization may be needed to explain the topography. Recently, a growing body of evidence suggests one such principle. The motor cortex appears to be partly organized as a map of complex, behaviorally useful actions that compose the animal's movement repertoire. In the action map perspective, the statistical complexity of the movement repertoire leads to the complexity of the cortical map.