(un)Conscious use of Sensation For Action

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The simple act of picking up a cup of coffee requires the brain to perform a complex series of sensory to motor transformations. Specifically, the brain must use visual information to locate the cup, and visual and proprioceptive information (e.g. information derived from joint and limb angles) to locate the hand. However, the volume of information necessary to be processed is immense and must be curtailed prior to processing. Further, it is clear that sometimes people are not in intentional control of their actions (consider swinging at a pitch in baseball that you know you should not). Thus, the short-term objectives of this research program are to (1) examine the mechanisms that limit conscious access to somatosensory information necessary for movement planning and control and (2) understand the role volitional judgement plays in the selection and optimization of visual information for action. Pursuit of these objectives will continue to advance my research program towards its long-term objective: to better understand the processes and cortical underpinnings supporting the preparation and execution of activities of daily living. In short, how does the nervous system decide which information to use, which information to ignore, and, pending these decisions, how the nervous system utilizes the relevant inputs? This will be examined using through 2 core paradigms -- tactile gating and sensory pre-cueing. A combination kinematic analyses and neurophysiological (TMS and EEG) will be used to characterize the behaviours and probe the underlying neural processes. In order to accomplish these objectives, a number of studies are proposed to test the following questions: 1A: Do the spatial and temporal characteristics of tactile gating change as a function of time and multi-sensory information availability? 1B:Will The magnitude of tactile gating vary with functional relevance to the task goal? 1C: Is tactile gating primarily cortical and generated by feed-forward interactions between frontal and parietal reaching networks? 2A: Do the degree and cortical basis of target encoding vary based on the availability and predictability upcoming sensory events? 2B: Can cues regarding optimal effector selection be integrated into the motor plan? These results of the proposed experiments will significantly increase our understanding of the cortical and behavioural basis for how human nervous system addresses this information barrage. Beyond this core basic understanding, these finding will have critical implications to our understanding of clinical syndromes (e.g., intention tremour, Autism) as well advanced skill performance (e.g., surgery, flight-training).