Infrastructure for interdisciplinary studies in embodied decisions and actions

人脑是我们所知的最强大的计算系统，为了理解它的机制，我们需要综合研究生物学、心理学以及计算理论。虽然有很多伟大的见解，特别是近年来，但我们对大脑的了解几乎都来自实验室研究，这些研究高度限制了受试者的行为。例如，在大多数关于视觉的研究中，受试者在观看静态刺激时保持头部完全静止，而大多数关于运动控制的研究一次只允许受试者向几个方向中的一个移动一条肢体。大脑并没有进化到能够处理这种贫困的情况。在一个不断变化的世界里，刺激可以随时改变，一个人自己的动作强烈地影响着什么行动是可用的，需要什么力量来执行它们。为了在生物学和计算层面上真正理解大脑，我们需要研究我们目前的模型和理论如何转化为动态世界，这些世界的挑战推动了大脑的进化。

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.