Shared somatosensory–motor neural population dynamics track motor recovery after stroke

Although somatosensation is known to be important for precise hand control, how coordinated activity across sensory and motor cortical areas supports hand movements and object interactions is unclear. We simultaneously recorded neural activity from dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) and Area 2 of the primary somatosensory cortex in three rhesus macaques performing a reach-to-grasp task during recovery from a primary motor cortex (M1) lesion. Using dual-area latent factor analysis, we decomposed population activity into cross-area factors (CFs) shared between PMd and Area 2 and within-area factors (WFs) local to each region. Shared CFs tracked hand kinematics closely despite explaining less overall variance. Strikingly, the emergence of long-timescale, stereotyped sensory-motor cross-area dynamics was correlated with recovery of prehension and object grasping, whereas changes in within-area dynamics were not correlated with recovery. These findings suggest that restoration of coordinated sensory-motor population dynamics is important for recovery of skilled hand function after injury.