Field Computation in Motor Control

Field computation deals with information processing in terms of elds continuous distributions of data Many neural phenomena are conveniently described as elds including neuron activity from large brain area to small dendritic scales Further it is often useful to describe motor control and sensorimotor coordination in terms of ex ternal elds such as force elds and sensory images We survey the basic concepts of eld computation including both feed forward eld operations and eld dynamics resulting from recurrent connections Adaptive and learning mechanisms are discussed brie y The appli cation of eld computation to motor control is illustrated by several examples external force elds associated with spinal neurons Bizzi Mussa Ivaldi population coding of direction in motor cor tex Georgopoulos continuous transformation of direction elds Droulez Berthoz a and linear gain elds and coordinate trans formations in posterior parietal cortex Andersen Next we survey some eld based representations of motion including direct Fourier Gabor and wavelet or multiresolution representations Fi nally we consider brie y the application of these representations to constraint satisfaction which has many applications in motor control This paper will appear in Self Organization Computational Maps and Motor Control ed by Pietro G Morasso and Vittorio Sanguineti Elsevier North Holland in press