Sensorimotor Processing

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Every day activities such a riding a bicycle, typing a summary and drinking a cup of coffee require the continuous interaction of brain systems that serve sensory perception and systems that control the body’s muscles. In other words, most of the things people do require sensorimotor integration. In this course, several important aspects of sensorimotor integration in the brain will be studied, particularly in the context of visual perception. Since sensory perception (visual as well as auditory) is covered extensively in other courses, the main focus here will be on the motor system and in the transformation and processing of sensory information for motor control. Initially, basic processes are covered, such as types of motor control (since visual perception takes time, how should individuals use past information to control future actions?), the representations used by primary and secondary motor areas (which parameter is under ultimate control: muscle contractions, joint angles or whole movements?) and coordinate transformations (how to get from incoming visual information, coded with respect to our current eye position, to motor commands, coded with respect to our current body posture). Later in the course, the focus will shift to higher level issues such as motor learning, action selection and decision making, and predicting the actions of others. All topics will be discussed in the context of cognitive neuroscience research so that students learn how these topics can be investigated both with classical behavioural experiments and with modern techniques such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.