Methylphenidate modulates motor cortical dynamics and behavior

Methylphenidate (MPH, brand: Ritalin) is a common stimulant used both medically and non-medically. Though typically prescribed for its cognitive effects, MPH also affects movement. While it is known that MPH noncompetitively blocks the reuptake of catecholamines through inhibition of dopamine and norepinephrine transporters, a critical step in exploring how it affects behavior is to understand how MPH directly affects neural activity. This would establish an electrophysiological mechanism of action for MPH. Since we now have biologically-grounded network-level hypotheses regarding how populations of motor cortical neurons plan and execute movements, there is a unique opportunity to make testable predictions regarding how systemic MPH administration – a pharmacological perturbation – might affect neural activity in motor cortex. To that end, we administered clinically-relevant doses of MPH to Rhesus monkeys as they performed an instructed-delay reaching task. Concomitantly, we measured neural activity from dorsal premotor and primary motor cortex. Consistent with our predictions, we found dose-dependent and significant effects on reaction time, trial-by-trial variability, and movement speed. We confirmed our hypotheses that changes in reaction time and variability were accompanied by previously established population-level changes in motor cortical preparatory activity and the condition-independent signal that precedes movements. We expected changes in speed to be a result of changes in the amplitude of motor cortical dynamics and/or a translation of those dynamics in activity space. Instead, our data are consistent with a mechanism whereby the neuromodulatory effect of MPH is to increase the gain and/or the signal-to-noise of motor cortical dynamics during reaching. Continued work in this domain to better understand the brain-wide electrophysiological mechanism of action of MPH and other psychoactive drugs could facilitate more targeted treatments for a host of cognitive-motor disorders.