The human sensorimotor control system has exceptional abilities to perform skilful action despite ever changing conditions. To precisely control our movements, the sensorimotor control system builds representations or motor memories of the external world. We examine how these motor memories to novel dynamics are formed, tuned and represented within our sensorimotor control system. The encoding of these representations – whether we encode our control as a function of specific kinematic or kinetic variables – is still unknown. For example, velocity dependent dynamics could be represented within the brain within a Cartesian, intrinsic or object reference frame. While initial studies suggested an intrinsic joint based representation, later studies found conflicting findings – each one suggesting different representations. I will outline some of our old work suggesting a mixture of representations, and our recent study that provides a unifying model of the representation that can explain the previous conflicting results. Finally, I will present recent work looking at long-term adaptation to novel dynamics, showing how they are continually refined over weeks of training.
Organizer
Patrick Forbes
p.forbes@erasmusmc.nl