Flexible strategies for sensory integration during motor planning

Multisensory integration during motor planning.

When planning goal-directed reaches, subjects must estimate the position of the arm by integrating visual and proprioceptive signals from the sensory periphery. These integrated position estimates are required at two stages of motor planning: first to determine the desired movement vector, and second to transform the movement vector into a joint-based motor command. We quantified the contributi...

Flexible Cognitive Strategies during Motor Learning

Visuomotor rotation tasks have proven to be a powerful tool to study adaptation of the motor system. While adaptation in such tasks is seemingly automatic and incremental, participants may gain knowledge of the perturbation and invoke a compensatory strategy. When provided with an explicit strategy to counteract a rotation, participants are initially very accurate, even without on-line feedback...

Hybrid Planning Using Flexible Strategies

Sensory-Motor Integration in the Medial Medulla

The rostromedial medulla, including the nucleus gigantocellularis (NGC) and magnocellularis (NMC), plays a role as a relay nucleus for both the sensory and motor systems. The NGC/NMC is important in the modulation of somatic and visceral activities. Electrophysiological and pharmacological studies have shown that the NGC/NMC is involved in nociception, locomotion, regulation of basal muscle ton...

Sensory-Motor Integration: More Variability Reduces Individuality

Motor neural networks and muscles produce identifiably common outputs, such as a trot or gallop, despite varations in intrinsic properties across individuals. New work shows that sensory input can induce the requisite decrease in across-individual variability even as it increases within-individual variability.