Motor learning refers broadly to changes in an organism's movements that reflect changes in the structure and function of the nervous system. Motor learning occurs over varying timescales and degrees of complexity: humans learn to walk or talk over the course of years, but continue to adjust to changes in height, weight, strength etc. over their lifetimes. Motor learning enables animals to gain new skills, and improves the smoothness and accuracy of movements, in some cases by calibrating simple movements like reflexes. Motor learning research often considers variables that contribute to motor program formation, sensitivity of error-detection processes, and strength of movement schemas. Motor learning is "relatively permanent", as the capability to respond appropriately is acquired and retained. Temporary gains in performance during practice or in response to some perturbation are often termed motor adaptation, a transient form of learning. Neuroscience research on motor learning is concerned with which parts of the brain and spinal cord represent movements and motor programs and how the nervous system processes feedback to change the connectivity and synaptic strengths. At the behavioral level, research focuses on the design and effect of the main components driving motor learning, i.e. the structure of practice and the feedback. The timing and organization of practice can influence information retention, e.g. how tasks can be subdivided and practiced, and the precise form of feedback can influence preparation, anticipation, and guidance of movement.
Muscle memory is a form of procedural memory that involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition, which has been used synonymously with motor learning. When a movement is repeated over time, the brain creates a long-term muscle memory for that task, eventually allowing it to be performed with little to no conscious effort. This process decreases the need for attention and creates maximum efficiency within the motor and memory systems. Muscle memory is found in many everyday activities that become automatic and improve with practice, such as riding bikes, driving motor vehicles, playing ball sports, typing on keyboards, entering PINs, playing musical instruments, poker, martial arts, swimming, dancing, and drawing.
The motor cortex is the region of the cerebral cortex involved in the planning, control, and execution of voluntary movements. The motor cortex is an area of the frontal lobe located in the posterior precentral gyrus immediately anterior to the central sulcus.
Central pattern generators (CPGs) are self-organizing biological neural circuits that produce rhythmic outputs in the absence of rhythmic input. They are the source of the tightly-coupled patterns of neural activity that drive rhythmic and stereotyped motor behaviors like walking, swimming, breathing, or chewing. The ability to function without input from higher brain areas still requires modulatory inputs, and their outputs are not fixed. Flexibility in response to sensory input is a fundamental quality of CPG-driven behavior. To be classified as a rhythmic generator, a CPG requires:
- "two or more processes that interact such that each process sequentially increases and decreases, and
- that, as a result of this interaction, the system repeatedly returns to its starting condition."
Motor control is the regulation of movements in organisms that possess a nervous system. Motor control includes conscious voluntary movements, subconscious muscle memory and involuntary reflexes, as well as instinctual taxis.
Neural oscillations, or brainwaves, are rhythmic or repetitive patterns of neural activity in the central nervous system. Neural tissue can generate oscillatory activity in many ways, driven either by mechanisms within individual neurons or by interactions between neurons. In individual neurons, oscillations can appear either as oscillations in membrane potential or as rhythmic patterns of action potentials, which then produce oscillatory activation of post-synaptic neurons. At the level of neural ensembles, synchronized activity of large numbers of neurons can give rise to macroscopic oscillations, which can be observed in an electroencephalogram. Oscillatory activity in groups of neurons generally arises from feedback connections between the neurons that result in the synchronization of their firing patterns. The interaction between neurons can give rise to oscillations at a different frequency than the firing frequency of individual neurons. A well-known example of macroscopic neural oscillations is alpha activity.
In physiology, motor coordination is the orchestrated movement of multiple body parts as required to accomplish intended actions, like walking. This coordination is achieved by adjusting kinematic and kinetic parameters associated with each body part involved in the intended movement. The modifications of these parameters typically relies on sensory feedback from one or more sensory modalities, such as proprioception and vision.
The premotor cortex is an area of the motor cortex lying within the frontal lobe of the brain just anterior to the primary motor cortex. It occupies part of Brodmann's area 6. It has been studied mainly in primates, including monkeys and humans. The functions of the premotor cortex are diverse and not fully understood. It projects directly to the spinal cord and therefore may play a role in the direct control of behavior, with a relative emphasis on the trunk muscles of the body. It may also play a role in planning movement, in the spatial guidance of movement, in the sensory guidance of movement, in understanding the actions of others, and in using abstract rules to perform specific tasks. Different subregions of the premotor cortex have different properties and presumably emphasize different functions. Nerve signals generated in the premotor cortex cause much more complex patterns of movement than the discrete patterns generated in the primary motor cortex.
The supplementary motor area (SMA) is a part of the motor cortex of primates that contributes to the control of movement. It is located on the midline surface of the hemisphere just in front of the primary motor cortex leg representation. In monkeys the SMA contains a rough map of the body. In humans the body map is not apparent. Neurons in the SMA project directly to the spinal cord and may play a role in the direct control of movement. Possible functions attributed to the SMA include the postural stabilization of the body, the coordination of both sides of the body such as during bimanual action, the control of movements that are internally generated rather than triggered by sensory events, and the control of sequences of movements. All of these proposed functions remain hypotheses. The precise role or roles of the SMA is not yet known.
The H1 neuron is located in the visual cortex of true flies of the order Diptera and mediates motor responses to visual stimuli. H1 is sensitive to horizontal motion in the visual field and enables the fly to rapidly and accurately respond to optic flow with motor corrections to stabilize flight. It is particularly responsive to horizontal forward motion associated with movement of the fly's own body during flight. Damage to H1 impairs the fly's ability to counteract disturbances during flight, suggesting that it is a necessary component of the optomotor response. H1 is an ideal system for studying the neural basis of information processing due to its highly selective and predictable responses to stimuli. Since the initial anatomical and physiological characterizations of H1 in 1976, study of the neuron has greatly benefited the understanding of neural coding in a wide range of organisms, especially the relationship between the neural code and behavior.
The primary motor cortex is a brain region that in humans is located in the dorsal portion of the frontal lobe. It is the primary region of the motor system and works in association with other motor areas including premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, posterior parietal cortex, and several subcortical brain regions, to plan and execute voluntary movements. Primary motor cortex is defined anatomically as the region of cortex that contains large neurons known as Betz cells, which, along with other cortical neurons, send long axons down the spinal cord to synapse onto the interneuron circuitry of the spinal cord and also directly onto the alpha motor neurons in the spinal cord which connect to the muscles.
A motor program is an abstract metaphor of the central organization of movement and control of the many degrees of freedom involved in performing an action.p. 182 Signals transmitted through efferent and afferent pathways allow the central nervous system to anticipate, plan or guide movement. Evidence for the concept of motor programs include the following:p. 182
Neural decoding is a neuroscience field concerned with the hypothetical reconstruction of sensory and other stimuli from information that has already been encoded and represented in the brain by networks of neurons. Reconstruction refers to the ability of the researcher to predict what sensory stimuli the subject is receiving based purely on neuron action potentials. Therefore, the main goal of neural decoding is to characterize how the electrical activity of neurons elicit activity and responses in the brain.
Gain field encoding is a hypothesis about the internal storage and processing of limb motion in the brain. In the motor areas of the brain, there are neurons which collectively have the ability to store information regarding both limb positioning and velocity in relation to both the body (intrinsic) and the individual's external environment (extrinsic). The input from these neurons is taken multiplicatively, forming what is referred to as a gain field. The gain field works as a collection of internal models off of which the body can base its movements. The process of encoding and recalling these models is the basis of muscle memory.
Sniffing is a perceptually-relevant behavior, defined as the active sampling of odors through the nasal cavity for the purpose of information acquisition. This behavior, displayed by all terrestrial vertebrates, is typically identified based upon changes in respiratory frequency and/or amplitude, and is often studied in the context of odor guided behaviors and olfactory perceptual tasks. Sniffing is quantified by measuring intra-nasal pressure or flow or air or, while less accurate, through a strain gauge on the chest to measure total respiratory volume. Strategies for sniffing behavior vary depending upon the animal, with small animals displaying sniffing frequencies ranging from 4 to 12 Hz but larger animals (humans) sniffing at much lower frequencies, usually less than 2 Hz. Subserving sniffing behaviors, evidence for an "olfactomotor" circuit in the brain exists, wherein perception or expectation of an odor can trigger brain respiratory center to allow for the modulation of sniffing frequency and amplitude and thus acquisition of odor information. Sniffing is analogous to other stimulus sampling behaviors, including visual saccades, active touch, and whisker movements in small animals. Atypical sniffing has been reported in cases of neurological disorders, especially those disorders characterized by impaired motor function and olfactory perception.
Motor adaptation, a form of motor learning, is the process of acquiring and restoring locomotor patterns through an error-driven learning process.
Rishikesh Narayanan is an Indian neuroscientist, computer engineer and a professor at the Molecular Biophysics Unit (MBU) of the Indian Institute of Science. He is the principal investigator at the Cellular Neurophysiology Laboratory of MBU where his team is engaged in researches on experimental and theoretical aspects of information processing in single neurons and their networks. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 2016, for his contributions to biological sciences.
Reza Shadmehr is an Iranian-American professor of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is known for his contributions to the fields of motor control, motor learning, and computational neuroscience.
Jessica Cardin is an American neuroscientist who is an associate professor of neuroscience at Yale University School of Medicine. Cardin's lab studies local circuits within the primary visual cortex to understand how cellular and synaptic interactions flexibly adapt to different behavioral states and contexts to give rise to visual perceptions and drive motivated behaviors. Cardin's lab applies their knowledge of adaptive cortical circuit regulation to probe how circuit dysfunction manifests in disease models.
Cyriel Marie Antoine Pennartz is a Dutch neuroscientist serving as professor and head of the Department of Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is known for his research on memory, motivation, circadian rhythms, perception and consciousness. Pennartz’ work uses a multidisciplinary combination of techniques to understand the relationships between distributed neural activity and cognition, including in vivo electrophysiology and optical imaging, animal behavior and computational modelling.
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