Patients with a scotoma in their central vision (e.g., due to macular degeneration, MD) commonly adopt a strategy to direct the eyes such that the image falls onto a peripheral location on the retina. This location is referred to as the preferred retinal locus (PRL). Although previous research has investigated the characteristics of this PRL, it is unclear whether eye movement metrics are modul...

Organisms move through the world by changing their shape, and here we explore the mapping from shape space to movements in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as it crawls on an agar plate. We characterize the statistics of the trajectories through the correlation functions of the orientation angular velocity, orientation angle and the mean-squared displacement, and we find that the loss of ori...

We describe a low-cost system designed to document bodily movement and neural activity and deliver rewards to monkeys behaving freely in their home cage. An important application is to studying brain-machine interface (BMI) systems during free behavior, since brain signals associated with natural movement can differ significantly from those associated with more commonly used constrained conditi...

Neurobiological research in genetically tractable organisms relies heavily on robust assays for behavioral phenotypes. The simple body plan of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans makes it particularly amenable to the use of automated microscopy and image analysis to describe behavioral patterns quantitatively. Forward genetic screens and screens of drug libraries require high-throughput phenoty...

In present-day movement science, N. A. Bernstein's formulation of the problems of motor control is often taken as the starting point. The reliance on Bernstein has not brought agreement among his followers, however. In this article, the authors pose the following question: Does the disagreement arise from the structure of his work itself or from incomplete exploitation of his thinking? By using...

SUMMARY A 23-year-old female student presented with a five-year history of abnormal sleep in which she would sit up or stand up for brief periods in the early morning, talk loudly for a couple of minutes and then lie back down. When woken by family members she would remember vivid dreams and nightmares. In one episode she had a fall that resulted in a subdural hematoma. On presentation at the p...

Characterization of lifetime behavioral changes is essential for understanding aging and aging-related diseases. However, such studies are scarce partly due to the lack of efficient tools. Here we describe and provide proof of concept for a stereo vision system that classifies and sequentially records at an extremely fine scale six different behaviors (resting, micro-movement, walking, flying, ...

Many goals of human motor behavior, such as reaching out to hold a child’s hand, specify the end point of movement but do not constrain the movement made between initial posture and final target. In this issue, Dingwell et al., pp. 1158–1170, write about a newly discovered normal human behavior that challenges a classic hypothesis that people plan such movements to optimize hand-trajectory smoo...

The ideomotor theory of voluntary behavior assumes that the selection and control of a concrete goal-directed movement depends on imagining its direct perceptual consequences. However, this perception-guided assumption neglects the fact that behavioral control entails a hierarchical mechanism wherein conceptual expectations - action goals - can modulate lower level perceptuo-motor representatio...