Postdoctoral Researcher, Control Policies in the Primate Motor Circuit Pruszynski Lab @ Sensorimotor Superlab​ The Pruszynski Laboratory at Western University is seeking a postdoctoral researcher to j...

Sensory feedback is needed to dynamically adjust motor behaviors as we interact with the world, and understanding sensory-guided motor control could be beneficial in guiding future therapeutic strategies for patients suffering from spinal cord injury or other neurological diseases. To explore some of the open questions in this topic, we spoke with several experts in the field: Professor Karl Friston (UCL); Dr. Andrew Pruszynski and Dr. Mehrdad Kashefi (Western University, Canada); Professor Fan Wang and Dr. Kyle Severson (MIT, USA); and Professor Anne Churchland and Dr. Felicia Davatolhagh (UCLA, USA). We discuss some of the main theories of sensory-motor integration, some of the challenges and open questions in this field, and exciting future directions, including neurorehabilitation.

The ability to anticipate rhythmic patterns is fundamental to human experience, enabling music appreciation, speech comprehension, and dancing in sync to music. How the brain learns to use acoustic information to guide motor behavior remains a key question whose neural underpinnings and evolutionary origins are debated, especially in non-human primates. To understand how brain areas involved in motor control naively respond to predictable tone patterns, we recorded large single neuron populations across primary somatosensory (S1), primary motor (M1), dorsal premotor (PMd), supplementary motor (SMA), pre-supplementary motor (preSMA) cortices, globus pallidus interna (GPi), and medial geniculate body (MGB) of a rhesus monkey. During passive listening (Experiment 1) with a reward only at the end of each trial, primarily the MGB, not motor areas, responded to the auditory tone patterns, ruling out the spontaneous entrainment of motor activity to auditory patterns. Almost all areas robustly

The extent to which a sequence of movements is prepared before initiating the first movement is a longstanding question in motor neuroscience. The observation that reaction time (RT) increases for lon...

Nature - Experiments with human volunteers and macaques show that expectations produced by probabilistic cueing of future sensory inputs shape motor circuit dynamics in order to increase the...

The complex mechanics of the arm make the neural control of reaching inherently posture dependent. Because previous reaching studies confound reach direction with final posture, it remains unknown how...

The complex mechanics of the arm make the neural control of reaching inherently posture dependent. Because previous reaching studies confound reach direction with final posture, it remains unknown how...