Bilinear gating of motor primitives: a principle linking dendritic computation to rapid goal-directed adaptation

Abstract

Movement requires the motor cortex to specify both \emph{what} action to produce and \emph{which goal} it serves, yet how individual neurons separate these factors is not understood. Here we show that in macaque motor cortex the \emph{burst fraction} of a neuron, the proportion of its spikes emitted in high-frequency bursts, encodes reach direction far more selectively than its overall firing rate. This dissociation is highly consistent: it holds in every one of 12 recording sessions spanning three animals and two laboratories (all $p<10^{-12}$) and survives controls that remove any contribution of firing rate, showing that goal information is concentrated specifically in bursts. We then show that this coding signature is the predicted consequence of dendritic coincidence detection in layer-5 pyramidal neurons: when a goal-related apical input coincides with a state-related basal drive the neuron bursts, so burst probability computes the product of goal and state, a bilinear gate $G(g)\,Y(s)$. A minimal two-compartment spiking model reproduces the effect, and the same multiplicative gate, embedded in a reinforcement-learning agent, supports zero-shot generalisation to new goals and rapid online adaptation, providing a computational rationale for segregating goal information into bursts. These results identify burst fraction as a goal-selective code in motor cortex, tie it to a concrete cellular mechanism, and show that the mechanism confers a learning advantage.