There have been conflicting accounts regarding the effectiveness of animations for learning. Procedural motor learning represents one of the few areas in which animations have consistently shown to be facilitative. Some have suggested that this benefit is related to activation of the mirror neuron system (MNS), with higher activation leading to better performance. This study examines this expla...

How do expectations about the identity of a forthcoming visual stimulus influence the neural mechanisms of perceptual decision making in the human brain? Previous investigations into this issue have mostly involved changing the subjects' attentional focus or the behavioral relevance of certain targets but rarely manipulated subjects' prior expectation about the likely identity of the stimulus. ...

Perceptual decisions are based on the temporal integration of sensory evidence for different states of the outside world. The timescale of this integration process varies widely across behavioral contexts and individuals, and it is diagnostic for the underlying neural mechanisms. In many situations, the decision-maker knows the required mapping between perceptual evidence and motor response (he...

Bilateral, high-frequency stimulation of the basal ganglia (STN-DBS) is in widespread use for the treatment of the motor symptoms of Parkinson׳s disease (PD). We present here the first psychophysical investigation of the effect of STN-DBS upon perceptual timing in the hundreds of milliseconds range, with both duration-based (absolute) and beat-based (relative) tasks; 13 patients with PD were as...

In subjects trained extensively to indicate a perceptual decision with an action, neural commands that generate the action can represent the process of forming the decision. However, it is unknown whether this representation requires overtraining or reflects a more general link between perceptual and motor processing. We examined how perceptual processing is represented in motor commands in nai...

Do gestures merely reflect problem-solving processes, or do they play a functional role in problem solving? We hypothesized that gestures highlight and structure perceptual-motor information, and thereby make such information more likely to be used in problem solving. Participants in two experiments solved problems requiring the prediction of gear movement, either with gesture allowed or with g...

how to cite this article: amini m, aliabadi f, alizade m, kalani m, qorbani m. the relationship between motor function and behavioral function in infants with low birth weight. iran j child neurol. autumn 2016; 10(4):49-55.   abstract objective nowadays, the evaluation of all aspects of infant development is important. however, in practice, some of these assessments, especially those requiring ...

Bisecting a visually presented stimulus is a sensitive test for attentional and motor biases in both healthy and brain-damaged participants. There are, in addition, perceptual effects on performance and several idiosyncratic biases. Experiments that manipulated the stimulus attributes have suggested that higher-level cognitive processes can also influence bisection accuracy. These observations ...

Traditional motor primitive approaches deal largely with open-loop policies which can only deal with small perturbations. In this paper, we present a new type of motor primitive policies which serve as closed-loop policies together with an appropriate learning algorithm. Our new motor primitives are an augmented version version of the dynamical system-based motor primitives [6] that incorporate...