Sensorimotor learning and control of motion in a novel coordinate system

The overall goal of this research is to better understand neuromotor mechanisms mediating motor function remapping in both training of novel motor coordination patterns and motion control of an end-effector within a new motor action space defined by a novel kinematic transformation. Of fundamental importance for understanding these mechanisms is its theoretical and practical relevance to human motor control and many real-world applications (e.g. tele-operation, virtual reality systems for rehabilitation). Neuromotor mechanisms mediating motor function remapping are incompletely understood. Most of early experiments studied motor learning and adaptation by characterizing reaching or pointing movements in the ordinary Euclidean space that has been over-learned by the motor system. To circumvent this limitation, we used an instrumented data-glove to record the kinematics of wrist and finger motion. This high-dimensional collection of signals was projected onto the position of an object (a cursor or endpoint ) on a computer screen via a linear hand-to-screen mapping. Here, we describe our studies with neurologically-intact human subjects in experiments of both motor skill training and object manipulation to characterize how neuromotor mechanisms mediate learning of both forward and inverse kinematic transformations that are entirely novel to the motor system