Friday Lunch Seminar (English) January 13, 2023
12:15 〜 13:00
(On-line)

Talk Title: Understanding the basis of motor control: studies on muscular null space and proprioception-based learning

Sergio Gurgone
Researcher
Brain Networks and Communication Laboratory
Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet)
National Institutes of Information and Communications Technology (NICT)

Host PI: Eiichi Naito

Abstract:
In this seminar, I will present both my previous research on muscular null space and my current project in CiNet on proprioception-based learning. The first part will be linked to the problem of the motor control by the central nervous system (CNS), caused by the high dimensionality of the human body and the redundancy in the motor control signals, such as muscle activations. For this reason, in fact, many combinations of muscle activations generate the same set of movements, while others do not generate movement at all – the so called “muscular null space”. In this talk, I will show that such space plays an important role in learning new coordinated muscle activation patterns, i.e., muscle synergies, and allows controlling additional movement degrees of freedom external to our body, augmenting our motor possibilities. The second part of the talk will focus on the feedback processing in motor learning. While the role of visual feedback is considered predominant, proprioceptive feedback has been often neglected. Here, I will show, with the preliminary results of our study, how reduced visual feedback can bring more focus on an internal representation of movement, based on proprioception.