Natural prey capture reveals flexible reconfiguration of canonical motor-cortical dynamics for online control

Abstract

The ability to record neural populations during natural behavior now allows us to ask whether canonical motor-cortical dynamics, defined largely in constrained reaches to static targets, also organize self-paced, feedback-rich actions that require continuous correction. We recorded sensorimotor cortex in marmosets freely capturing live prey, a behavior that separates into ballistic quick captures and dynamic pursuits requiring real-time adjustment. Ballistic captures corresponded to canonical cortical reaching dynamics without an instructed delay, including near-orthogonal premovement and movement subspaces. Pursuits did not recruit additional neural dimensions; despite their elaborate kinematics, dynamics evolved within the same low-dimensional subspace. Corrective movements during pursuit reorganized this geometry into a distinct feedback-dominated regime, in which premovement activity weakly predicted movement, trajectory tangling increased, and a smaller, slower rotation restarted from a shifted initial state. Yet all movement types shared a sequential firing-rate backbone, which during ballistic capture was organized across the cortex as a somatotopically directed propagating wave that weakened when movements required online correction. These results show that sensorimotor cortex preserves canonical dynamical structure while flexibly reconfiguring it for online control in natural behavior.