Image: FRIAS Motor Control Project Group
On February 9 and 10, a project group formed by BrainLinks-BrainTools- and BCF-affiliated scientists Ilka Diester, Christian Leukel, Carsten Mehring, Stefan Rotter, Robert Schmidt and Cornelius Weiller at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), will be hosting a workshop on the topic of „Motor Control“. It aims at bringing together experts from various fields to present and discuss recent progress in unravelling the computational and neural mechanisms of biological motor control.
Biological motor control is characterized by high amounts of flexibility, adaptivity and coordination. Hundreds of skeletal muscles and numerous degrees of freedom of associated joints are controlled and coordinated with apparent ease by the central nervous system. While basic principles of motor control and motor learning have been studied at length, little attention has been given to the relation of cellular mechanisms and neural activities to findings based on computational models. This is what the FRIAS-funded project group „Neural networks of motor control and motor learning“ is addressing. As the title implies, the involved researchers believe that a fundamental advance in our understanding of biological motor control is possible by investigating the motor system on the level of neuronal networks as well as by merging findings from different approaches.