Motor Control In Everyday Actions

Motor Control in Everyday Actions presents 47 true stories that illustrate the phenomena of motor control, learning, perception, and attention in sport, physical activity, home, and work environments. At times humorous and sometimes sobering, this unique text provides an accessible application-to-research approach to spark critical thinking, class discussion, and new ideas for research. The stories in Motor Control in Everyday Actions illustrate the diversity and complexity of research in perception and action and motor skill acquisition. More than interesting anecdotes, these stories offer concrete examples of how motor behavior, motor control, and perception and action errors affect the lives of both well-known and ordinary individuals in various situations and environments. Readers will be entertained with real-life stories that illustrate how research in motor control is applicable to real life: •Choking Under Pressure examines information processing and how it changes under pressure. •The Gimme Putt shows how Schmidt’s law can be used to predict the accuracy of golf putts. •Turn Right at the Next Gorilla examines inattention blindness and its role in traffic accidents. •The Farmers’ Market describes reasons why a man drives his car through a crowded open-air market, killing and injuring dozens of shoppers in the process. •Craps and Weighted Bats describes the curious role of myths and superstition in how we play games. •And 42 other examples of motor control in everyday actions will both entertain and inform. Each story is followed by a set of self-directed activities that are progressively more complex. These activities, plus the additional notes and suggested readings and websites at the conclusion of each story, provide a starting point for critical thinking about the reasons why human actions sometimes go awry. A reader-friendly writing style and easy-to-follow analysis and conclusions assist students in gaining mastery of the issues presented, conceptualizing new research projects, and applying the content to current research. The stories are grouped into three parts, beginning with situations involving errors and mistakes in perception, action, or decision making. Next, stories investigating varied techniques for studying perception and action are presented. The remaining scenarios provide readers with a look at research focusing on the motor learning process as well as some of the unexpected discoveries resulting from those investigations. Motor Control in Everyday Actions will engage its readers—not only through the central topic of the story but also in the fundamental concepts involving perception, action, and learning. Used as a springboard for new research or as a catalyst for engaging discussion, Motor Control in Everyday Actions offers perspectives that will enhance understanding of how human beings interact with their world.

Motor Control in Everyday Actions presents 47 true stories that illustrate the phenomena of motor control, learning, perception, and attention in sport, physical activity, home, and work environments. At times humorous and sometimes sobering, this unique text provides an accessible application-to-research approach to spark critical thinking, class discussion, and new ideas for research. The stories in Motor Control in Everyday Actions illustrate the diversity and complexity of research in perception and action and motor skill acquisition. More than interesting anecdotes, these stories offer concrete examples of how motor behavior, motor control, and perception and action errors affect the lives of both well-known and ordinary individuals in various situations and environments. Readers will be entertained with real-life stories that illustrate how research in motor control is applicable to real life: Choking Under Pressure examines information processing and how it changes under pressure; The Gimme Putt shows how Schmidt's law can be used to predict the accuracy of golf putts; Turn Right at the Next Gorilla examines inattention blindness and its role in traffic accidents; The Farmers' Market describes reasons why a man drives his car through a crowded open-air market, killing and injuring dozens of shoppers in the process; Craps and Weighted Bats describes the curious role of myths and superstition in how we play games; And 42 other examples of motor control in everyday actions will both entertain and inform. Each story is followed by a set of self-directed activities that are progressively more complex. These activities, plus the additional notes and suggested readings and websites at the conclusion of each story, provide a starting point for critical thinking about the reasons why human actions sometimes go awry. A reader-friendly writing style and easy-to-follow analysis and conclusions assist students in gaining mastery of the issues presented, conceptualizing new research projects, and applying the content to current research. The stories are grouped into three parts, beginning with situations involving errors and mistakes in perception, action, or decision making. Next, stories investigating varied techniques for studying perception and action are presented. The remaining scenarios provide readers with a look at research focusing on the motor learning process as well as some of the unexpected discoveries resulting from those investigations. Motor Control in Everyday Actions will engage its readers--not only through the central topic of the story but also in the fundamental concepts involving perception, action, and learning. Used as a springboard for new research or as a catalyst for engaging discussion, Motor Control in Everyday Actions offers perspectives that will enhance understanding of how human beings interact with their world.

Motor Control and Learning, Sixth Edition, focuses on observable movement behavior, the many factors that influence quality of movement, and how movement skills are acquired.

This book presents an authoritative overview of memory in everyday contexts, and gathers together research on some of the more neglected areas of memory, to provide a comprehensive overview of remembering in real life contexts.

Mastering a rich repertoire of motor behaviors, as humans and other animals do, is a surprising and still poorly understood outcome of evolution, development, and learning. Many degrees-of-freedom, non-linear dynamics, and sensory delays provide formidable challenges for controlling even simple actions. Modularity as a functional element, both structural and computational, of a control architecture might be the key organizational principle that the central nervous system employs for achieving versatility and adaptability in motor control. Recent investigations of muscle synergies, motor primitives, compositionality, basic action concepts, and related work in machine learning have contributed to advance, at different levels, our understanding of the modular architecture underlying rich motor behaviors. However, the existence and nature of the modules in the control architecture is far from settled. For instance, regularity and low-dimensionality in the motor output are often taken as an indication of modularity but could they simply be a byproduct of optimization and task constraints? Moreover, what are the relationships between modules at different levels, such as muscle synergies, kinematic invariants, and basic action concepts? One important reason for the new interest in understanding modularity in motor control from different viewpoints is the impressive development in cognitive robotics. In comparison to animals and humans, the motor skills of today’s best robots are limited and inflexible. However, robot technology is maturing to the point at which it can start approximating a reasonable spectrum of isolated perceptual, cognitive, and motor capabilities. These advances allow researchers to explore how these motor, sensory and cognitive functions might be integrated into meaningful architectures and to test their functional limits. Such systems provide a new test bed to explore different concepts of modularity and to address the interaction between motor and cognitive processes experimentally. Thus, the goal of this Research Topic is to review, compare, and debate theoretical and experimental investigations of the modular organization of the motor control system at different levels. By bringing together researchers seeking to understand the building blocks for coordinating many muscles, for planning endpoint and joint trajectories, and for representing motor and behavioral actions in memory we aim at promoting new interactions between often disconnected research areas and approaches and at providing a broad perspective on the idea of modularity in motor control. We welcome original research, methodological, theoretical, review, and perspective contributions from behavioral, system, and computational motor neuroscience research, cognitive psychology, and cognitive robotics.

An understanding of the scientific principles underpinning the learning and execution of fundamental and skilled movements is of central importance in disciplines across the sport and exercise sciences. The second edition of Motor Control, Learning and Development: Instant Notes offers students an accessible, clear and concise introduction to the core concepts of motor behavior, from learning through to developing expertise. Including two brand new chapters on implicit versus explicit learning and motor control and aging, this new edition is fully revised and updated, and covers: definitions, theories and measurements of motor control; information processing, neurological issues and sensory factors in control; theories and stages of motor learning; memory and feedback; the development of fundamental movement skills; and the application of theory to coaching and rehabilitation practice. Highly illustrated and well-formatted, the book allows readers to grasp complex ideas quickly, through learning objectives, research highlights, review questions and activities, and encourages students to deepen their understanding through further reading suggestions. This is important foundational reading for any student taking classes in motor control, learning or behavior or skill acquisition, or a clear and concise reference for any practicing sports coach, physical education teacher or rehabilitation specialist.

Stroke Rehabilitation: Insights from Neuroscience and Imaging informs and challenges neurologists, rehabilitation therapists, imagers, and stroke specialists to adopt more restorative and scientific approaches to stroke rehabilitation based on new evidence from neuroscience and neuroimaging literatures. The fields of cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging are advancing rapidly and providing new insights into human behavior and learning. Similarly, improved knowledge of how the brain processes information after injury and recovers over time is providing new perspectives on what can be achieved through rehabilitation. Stroke Rehabilitation explores the potential to shape and maximize neural plastic changes in the brain after stroke from a multimodal perspective. Active skill based learning is identified as a central element of a restorative approach to rehabilitation. The evidence behind core learning principles as well as specific learning strategies that have been applied to retrain lost functions of movement, sensation, cognition and language are also discussed. Current interventions are evaluated relative to this knowledge base and examples are given of how active learning principles have been successfully applied in specific interventions. The benefits and evidence behind enriched environments is reviewed with examples of potential application in stroke rehabilitation. The capacity of adjunctive therapies, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, to modulate receptivity of the damaged brain to benefit from behavioral interventions is also discussed in the context of this multimodal approach. Focusing on new insights from neuroscience and imaging, the book explores the potential to tailor interventions to the individual based on viable brain networks.

This up-to-date handbook focuses on the study of action, or"motor control,"which examines movement and skill and the internal processes that lead to them. As action is interrelated with cognition, this is a vigorous field of investigation.Written by international experts, Motor Skills provides current reviews on general processes important to motor control--learning, coordination, timing, planning, and control--and on the individual skills of throwing, catching, reaching, and typing.The text describes important conceptual and methodological advances regarding control theory and timing, and is divided into two sections which analyze skill from the perspectives of general processes and individual skills.