Data Acquisition

Each rat was tethered to the implanted arrays through a motorized commutator that allowed free movement within the testing chamber. Neuronal activity was recorded using TDT hardware and a custom TDT OpenEx system circuit with a bandpass filter between 300 and 5,000 Hz and sampling rate at 25 kHz. Following the lesion and array implants, each rat was tested on the reach task on post-operative days 3-28 during a reach task session of 25 trials or a maximum of 20 minutes. When the rat reached through the 1-cm Plexiglas slot, a photobeam was broken (beam break). A user-operated button was pressed each time a rat had a successful reach to differentiate successful and unsuccessful reaches. The TDT circuit collected raw waveforms of the extracellularly-recorded neuronal spikes on each channel for each electrode site as well as time stamps for the beam-break and button press (successful reaches). All data were processed offline using custom MATLAB scripts to determine the correlation between phases of the behavior and neuronal activity.