Investigating contextual effects in motor learning

这一博士职位将涉及研究视觉引导的人类手部运动，以更好地了解人类感官运动控制的各个方面。特别是，它将着眼于影响运动性能的问题，以及为什么有些环境使我们能够轻松地学习新任务，而另一些环境则不能。博士工作将在普利茅斯的一个人类运动神经科学实验室进行，预计该学生将招募参与者并进行实验研究。为此，监督小组将提供培训。在项目开始时，学生将进行研究团队已经建立的实验，以促进学习如何开发和进行实验研究。在博士学位的后期，预计学生将提出他们自己的研究问题和实验范例，以研究人类运动控制的其他方面。这些可能涉及对运动任务动态或其视觉环境的操纵。这项工作将通过使用在二维虚拟环境中操作的vBot机器人操作手在人类参与者身上进行运动实验来进行。这使得能够在操作给定任务的视觉反馈和动态时跟踪和记录运动。

This PhD position will involve investigating visually guided human hand movements to better understand aspects of human sensori motor control. In particular it will look at issues that affect movement performance and why there are some context that enable us to easily learn novel tasks and others that do not. The PhD work will be based in a human motor neuroscience laboratory in Plymouth, and the student will be expected to recruit participants and run experimental studies. To do so, training will be provided by the supervisory team. At the start of the project the student will run experiments which have already been set up by the research team, to facilitate learning of how to develop and conduct experimental studies. Later in the PhD it is expected that the student will come up with their own research questions and experimental paradigms, to investigate additional aspects of human motor control. These could involve manipulations of the movement task dynamics or its visual environment. The work will be carried out by running movement experiment on human participants using a vBot robotic manipulandum operating in a two-dimensional virtual environment. This enables movements to be tracked and recorded while the visual feedback and dynamics of a given task are manipulated.