Space, time and energy are the three most fundamental elements in our intellectual understanding of the physical world. Here, I found how these same elements also contribute to a stable and coherent representation that the motor system forms by combining information from different sensory sources, such as vision, touch and proprioception to perform accurate movements and to skillfully manipulate objects in the environment. I provide experimental evidence to show that motor adaptation is a progressive optimization of the kinetic energy exchanged between the arm and the environment. I introduce the notion of sensory agreement to demonstrate that it is a perquisite for motor adaptation, allowing people to naturally converge to the energetically optimal movement. Additionally, I report theoretical and experimental evidence to suggest that the integration of sensory information for estimating the arm inertia does not take place continuously in time but only at discrete transient contact events by maintaining an invariant estimate of the kinetic energy exchanged with the environment across sensing modalities. This allows the brain to overcome the temporal intermodal alignment problem that results from the natural staggering of information flow along different sensory channels.

Last modified

• 10/26/2018

Creator

• Ali Farshchiansadegh

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N24752

Subject

• Biomedical Engineering

Keyword

• Biomedical Engineering

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright