Seminar Details
2023-12-12 (14h) : Closed loop control model of human reaching movements
At Euler building (room A.002)
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Crevecoeur, Frédéric
Abstract :
Current research in motor control aims to understand how the brain transforms sensory information into motor commands. This question is surprisingly difficult when one considers the complexity of all the components of the biological system: the human body is a complex structure with intricate geometry, non-linear dynamics, delays and noise, while the nervous system consists of distributed processing in a network of billions of cells, dealing with information from multiple senses with their own reference frames and statistical properties. In the face of this complexity, researchers have relied on simplifying assumptions and on the theory of optimal control, enabling simple movements to be modeled and macroscopic properties of behavior to be described. Recently, our lab has focused on how healthy humans respond to changes in the environment that are consistent with model parameters and motor costs. I will present examples of results showing that the human brain updates the online controller following changes in the environment. We will discuss the implications of these experimental results from the point of view of theoretical models of control and present how they can be exploited to gain new insight into the neural basis of motor dysfunctions in clinical populations.