Sensorimotor control and learning are fundamental prerequisites for cognitive development in humans and animals. Evidence from behavioral sciences and neuroscience suggests that motor and brain development are strongly intertwined with the experiential process of exploration, where internal body representations are formed and maintained over time. In order to guide our movements, our brain must...

This paper examines the interest of a developmental approach applied to the design of autonomous robots and the understanding of adaptive behaviors, such as imitation. The proposed model is a neu-ral network architecture that learns and uses associations between vision and arm movements, even if the problem is ill posed (in the case of mapping problems between the visual space and the joints sp...

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NATO Task Group 128 identifies that behaviour in military simulations is often too mechanistic in nature. In this paper we will argue that behaviour in simulations can be improved if the two central aspects of behaviour modelling, i.e. action selection and performance modelling, are not addressed as separate issues, but as interacting instead. We will describe how the interaction between these ...

[Purpose] Motor control and muscle strength impairments are the prime reasons for motor behavior disorders in children with spastic cerebral palsy. These impairments lead to histological changes in muscle growth and the learning of motor skills. Therefore, such children experience reduced muscle force generation and decreased muscle flexibility. We investigated the effect of training with Ninte...

To elucidate the neural substrate associated with capabilities for kinesthetic motor imagery of difficult whole-body movements, we measured brain activity during a trial involving both kinesthetic motor imagery and action observation as well as during a trial with action observation alone. Brain activity was assessed with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Nineteen participants imagi...

the main purpose of this study was to determine which correlate, perceived motor competence or motor skill competence, best predicts girls' physical activity behavior.a sample of 352 girls (mean age=8.7, sd=0.3 yr) participated in this study. to assess motor skill competence and perceived motor competence, each child completed the test of gross motor development-2 and physical ability sub-scale...