Infrastructure for interdisciplinary studies in embodied decisions and actions

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The human brain is the most powerful computational system known to us, and to understand its mechanisms we need integrated studies in biology and psychology as well as computational theory. While great insights are being made, especially in recent years, nearly everything we know about the brain comes from laboratory studies that highly constrain a subject’s behavior. For example, in most studies of vision subjects keep their head perfectly still while looking at a static stimulus, and most studies of motor control allow the subject to move only one limb at a time in one of a few directions. The brain did not evolve to deal with such impoverished situations. It evolved to deal with complex behavior in a constantly changing world, where stimuli can alter at any moment and where one’s own motion strongly influences what actions are available and what forces are needed to execute them. To truly understand the brain at both biological and computational levels, we need to investigate how our current models and theories translate into the dynamic world whose challenges drove brain evolution.