Task-discriminative space-by-time factorization of muscle activity

Movement generation has been hypothesized to rely on a modular organization of muscle activity. Crucial to this hypothesis is the ability to perform reliably a variety of motor tasks by recruiting a limited set of modules and combining them in a task-dependent manner. Thus far, existing algorithms that extract putative modules of muscle activations, such as Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), identify modular decompositions that maximize the reconstruction of the recorded EMG data. Typically, the functional role of the decompositions, i.e., task accomplishment, is only assessed a posteriori. However, as motor actions are defined in task space, we suggest that motor modules should be computed in task space too. In this study, we propose a new module extraction algorithm, named DsNM3F, that uses task information during the module identification process. DsNM3F extends our previous space-by-time decomposition method (the so-called sNM3F algorithm, which could assess task performance only after having computed modules) to identify modules gauging between two complementary objectives: reconstruction of the original data and reliable discrimination of the performed tasks. We show that DsNM3F recovers the task dependence of module activations more accurately than sNM3F. We also apply it to electromyographic signals recorded during performance of a variety of arm pointing tasks and identify spatial and temporal modules of muscle activity that are highly consistent with previous studies. DsNM3F achieves perfect task categorization without significant loss in data approximation when task information is available and generalizes as well as sNM3F when applied to new data. These findings suggest that the space-by-time decomposition of muscle activity finds robust task-discriminating modular representations of muscle activity and that the insertion of task discrimination objectives is useful for describing the task modulation of module recruitment.