Sensorimotor Neuroscience and Biorobotics

Lab Description

Standing upright is a continuous struggle
against Earth’s gravitational pull. Our vertical posture is inherently unstable
and must be balanced within a small base of support. Ongoing balance control
relies on complex interactions between the biomechanics of our body, the neural
dynamics of our sensory/motor systems, and our cognitive perception of upright
posture. While these biomechanical and neural factors of balance have intrigued
researchers for decades, methodological difficulties in unraveling their
interactions provides an incomplete picture of how the brain controls standing.
We aim to disentangle these neuromechanical contributions to standing balance
by combining robotic simulation, human neurophysiology and psychophysics to study
to understand the brain’s continuous control of our unstable body. In addition,
our work focuses on the central processing and behavioral impact of the
vestibular system, which encodes head movement and orientation in space, and is
a critical contributor to standing balance. Using electrical stimulation
techniques to artificially activate the vestibular system, we are able to probe
how the brain integrates this sensory signal of self-motion for additional
sensorimotor tasks such as reaching, oculomotor control and perceiving
movement. 

Selected Publications