Event Date
Wilsaan Joiner, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, College of Biological Sciences & Department of Neurology, School of Medicine
Center for Neuroengineering & Medicine, Center for Neuroscience, Center for Mind and Brain
UC Davis
ABSTRACT
The mammalian brain generates motor commands to initiate movement. Through interactions with our environment, as well as other influences (e.g., reward), this motor output is adjusted in order to reduce the error between the planned/intended movements and the actual motions of the body. Previous theoretical, physiological and behavioral work has strongly suggested that the transformation of desired body motions into appropriate muscle activations involves changes in internal models—neural systems that predict the sensory consequences of our movements in order to prepare for self-induced changes in sensation. In this talk, I will present an overview of our recent research on the use of internal models in diverse aspects of motor behavior. Specifically, I will describe how internal models may play a key role in (1) the observed inter-limb differences in motor adaptation to force perturbations during reaching arm movements and (2) learning novel upper limb prosthetic control based on sonomyography—the sensing of residual muscle mechanical deformations using ultrasound. Collectively, these insights may be useful for the effective design of rehabilitation paradigms, and the selection of more intuitive, motion-based signals for prosthetic control.