Infrastructure for interdisciplinary studies in embodied decisions and actions

人类大脑是我们所知的最强大的计算系统，为了理解它的机制，我们需要在生物学和心理学以及计算理论方面进行综合研究。虽然人们对大脑有了很好的认识，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，在大多数视觉研究中，受试者在观看静态刺激时保持头部完全静止，而大多数运动控制研究允许受试者在几个方向中的一个方向上一次只移动一个肢体。大脑没有进化到处理这种贫困的情况。它的进化是为了处理一个不断变化的世界中的复杂行为，在这个世界中，刺激可以随时改变，一个人自己的运动强烈影响着什么样的行动是可用的，什么样的力量是执行这些行动所需要的。为了在生物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，而动态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.