Mechanisms of sensory processing in human motor control and learning

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People vary in their ability to learn motor skills, but studies typically focus on learning patterns averaged across groups of people. This leads to a fundamental yet unresolved question in motor neuroscience: why do some people learn to perform motor skills better than others? This grant tests whether the variation of human motor control and learning can be explained by a fundamental principle of optimal feedback control that the selection of different control strategies determines how the nervous system deals with disturbances that arise during movement. In this proposal, I outline three parts of my research program that examine how individual people respond to mechanical disturbances while performing different motor tasks with their arm, and learning to compensate for novel loads applied to their arm during reaching. Taken together, the projects in this proposal shift the focus from group behaviour to understanding how individual people control and adapt their arm movements. This will be an important step toward my long-term goal of understanding the behavioural, neurophysiological and computational bases of human motor control and learning. The results of this research program will be of interest to neuroscientists who study the sensory and motor systems, and may also provide a basis for improving how we teach and rehabilitate motor skills in health and disease.