The Acquisition Of Motor Behavior In Vertebrates

Our motor skills determine how well we perform in athletics, dance, music, and in carrying out countless daily chores. While our proficiency at performing individual actions and synthesizing them into seamless sequences limits our athletic and artistic talents, we are not perpetually bound by such limitations. The nervous system can acquire new, and modify old, motor behaviors through experience and practice. That is motor learning.The Acquisition of Motor Behavior in Vertebratesprovides a broad, multidisciplinary survey of recent research on the brain systems and mechanisms underlying motor learning. Following the editors' introduction, nineteen contributions report on the neurobiology of these higher brain functions and on diverse types of motor learning such as reflex adaptation, conditioned and instrumental reflex learning, visually guided actions, and complex sequences and skills.

This cutting-edge book offers a theoretical account of the evolution of multiple memory systems of the brain. The authors conceptualize these memory systems from both behavioral and neurobiological perspectives, guided by three related principles. First, that our understanding of a wide range of memory phenomena can be advanced by breaking down memory into multiple forms with different operating characteristics. Second, that different forms of memory representation are supported by distinct brain pathways with circuitry and neural coding properties. Third, that the contributions of different brain systems can be compared and contrasted by distinguishing between dedicated (or specific) and elaborate (or general) memory systems. A primary goal of this work is to relate the neurobiological properties of dedicated and elaborate systems to their neuropsychological counterparts, and in so doing, account for the phenomenology of memory, from conditioning to conscious recollection.

From an engineering standpoint, the increasing complexity of robotic systems and the increasing demand for more autonomously learning robots, has become essential. This book is largely based on the successful workshop “From motor to interaction learning in robots” held at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robot Systems. The major aim of the book is to give students interested the topics described above a chance to get started faster and researchers a helpful compandium.

This single volume brings together both theoretical developments in the field of motor control and their translation into such fields as movement disorders, motor rehabilitation, robotics, prosthetics, brain-machine interface, and skill learning. Motor control has established itself as an area of scientific research characterized by a multi-disciplinary approach. Its goal is to promote cooperation and mutual understanding among researchers addressing different aspects of the complex phenomenon of motor coordination. Topics covered include recent theoretical advances from various fields, the neurophysiology of complex natural movements, the equilibrium-point hypothesis, motor learning of skilled behaviors, the effects of age, brain injury, or systemic disorders such as Parkinson's Disease, and brain-computer interfaces. The chapter ‘Encoding Temporal Features of Skilled Movements—What, Whether and How?’ is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

This book is concerned with the involvement of the cerebellum in learning and remembering motor tasks. It is unique in discussing plasticity at both the cellular and at the behavioral level.

An introduction to the computational biology of reaching and pointing, with an emphasis on motor learning. Neuroscience involves the study of the nervous system, and its topics range from genetics to inferential reasoning. At its heart, however, lies a search for understanding how the environment affects the nervous system and how the nervous system, in turn, empowers us to interact with and alter our environment. This empowerment requires motor learning. The Computational Neurobiology of Reaching and Pointing addresses the neural mechanisms of one important form of motor learning. The authors integrate material from the computational, behavioral, and neural sciences of motor control that is not available in any other single source. The result is a unified, comprehensive model of reaching and pointing. The book is intended to be used as a text by graduate students in both neuroscience and bioengineering and as a reference source by experts in neuroscience, robotics, and other disciplines. The book begins with an overview of the evolution, anatomy, and physiology of the motor system, including the mechanisms for generating force and maintaining limb stability. The sections that follow, "Computing Locations and Displacements", "Skills, Adaptations, and Trajectories", and "Predictions, Decisions, and Flexibility", present a theory of sensorially guided reaching and pointing that evolves organically based on computational principles rather than a traditional structure-by-structure approach. The book also includes five appendixes that provide brief refreshers on fundamentals of biology, mathematics, physics, and neurophysiology, as well as a glossary of relevant terms. The authors have also made supplemental materials available on the Internet. These web documents provide source code for simulations, step-by-step derivations of certain mathematical formulations, and expanded explanations of some concepts.

Covers the basic sciences relevant to recovery of function following injury to the nervous system.