Latest Motor control Stories
Smell and touch, sniffing and 'whisking,' are locked in sync When animals are on the hunt for food they likely use many senses, and scientists have wondered how the different senses work together. New research from the laboratory of CSHL neuroscientist and Assistant Professor Adam Kepecs shows that when rats actively use the senses of smell (sniffing) and touch (through their whiskers) those two processes are locked in synchronicity. The team's paper, published today in the Journal of...
Adding movement to mental rehearsal can improve performance finds a study in BioMed Central's open access journal Behavioral and Brain Functions. For high jumpers the study shows that dynamic imagery improves the number of successful attempts and the technical performance of jumps. The technique of mental rehearsal is used to consolidate performance in many disciplines including music and sport. Motor imagery and physical practice use overlapping neural networks in the brain and the two...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online We make snap judgments about other people all the time, whether we like to admit it or not. In speed dating, this is especially true because we are deciding someone's romantic potential in relatively few seconds. How we make those fast decisions is not very well understood, however. A research team from the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH) and Trinity College, Dublin has found that people make such speed-dating...
A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to efficiently adapt to uncertain, changing and open-ended environments. In such environments, efficient adaptive behavior often requires considering multiple alternative behavioral strategies, adjusting them, and possibly inventing new ones. These reasoning, learning and creative abilities involve the frontal lobes, which are especially well developed in humans compared to other primates. However, how the frontal function decides to create new...
Findings establish a model to study how the brain processes multisensory information, a process that goes awry in autism spectrum disorders The next time you set a trap for that rat running around in your basement, here's something to consider: you are going up against an opponent whose ability to assess the situation and make decisions is statistically just as good as yours. A Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) study that compared the ability of humans and rodents to make perceptual...
We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, absorbing information, weighing it carefully, and making thoughtful decisions. But, as it turns out, we’re kidding ourselves. Over the past few decades, scientists have shown there are many different internal and external factors influencing how we think, feel, communicate, and make decisions at any given moment. One particularly powerful influence may be our own bodies, according to new research reviewed in the December issue of...
What happens in the brain of right-handed people if their dominant hand is immobile for two weeks? This is the question addressed in the latest study led by Professor Lutz Jäncke and the Trauma Surgery Department at Zurich University Hospital. For the study, ten right-handed people with broken upper right arms were examined. Because of the plaster or sling, the test people's right hands were restricted to little or no movement for fourteen days. Therefore they used their left hands for daily...
Researchers discover how the brain merges sights and sounds In order to get a better picture of our surroundings, the brain has to integrate information from different senses, but how does it know which signals to combine? New research involving scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Tübingen, the University of Oxford, and the University of Bielefeld has demonstrated that humans exploit the correlation...
Iannuzzo’s Karate School helps children develop hand-eye coordination skills by having blocks, punches and kicks aimed towards multiple angles and from alternating stances. Over the past few weeks one student in particular has gone from a child with poor hand-eye coordination skills to a top varsity athlete as a result of his martial arts training at Iannuzzo’s Karate School. (PRWEB) October 05, 2011 Seventh degree black belt and master instructor, Rick Iannuzzo has trained...
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but how do our brains decide when and who we should copy? Researchers from The University of Nottingham have found that the key may lie in an unspoken invitation communicated through eye contact.In a study published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, a team of scientists from the University's School of Psychology show that eye contact seems to act as an invitation for mimicry, triggering mechanisms in the frontal region of the brain that...
