Motor-like neural dynamics in two parietal areas during arm reaching

•Parietal cortex activity shows simple neural dynamics during arm movements.•Movement activity is decomposed into arm acceleration and deceleration states.•Single neurons’ activity modulations account for transitions between states.•Similarities with motor cortex suggest common computational principles. The classical view on motor control makes a clear distinction between the role of motor cortex in controlling muscles and parietal cortex in processing movement plans and goals. However, the strong parieto-frontal connections argue against such clear-cut separation of function. Modern dynamical approaches revealed that population activity in motor cortex can be captured by a limited number of patterns, called neural states that are preserved across diverse motor behaviors. Whether such dynamics are also present in parietal cortex is unclear. Here, we studied neural dynamics in the primate parietal cortex during arm movements and found three main states temporally coupled to the planning, execution and target holding epochs. Strikingly, as reported recently in motor cortex, execution was subdivided into distinct, arm acceleration- and deceleration-related, states. These results suggest that dynamics across parieto-frontal areas are highly consistent and hint that parietal population activity largely reflects timing constraints while motor actions unfold.