Brain mechanism of proactive control

Description

How can human as well as other animals respond to constantly changing environment in spite of inevitable time-delay required for processing and transferring information in sensory-motor system? A predictive mechanism should exist in order to compensate this delay or to generate appropriate behavior.

In relation to the predictive function for compensating the delay in visual-motor system, a number of psychophysical studies on hand/eye-tracking behaviour have been carried out by using a variety of stimuli, including simple harmonic frequency. Yasuji et. al investigated particularly the proactive nature of the visual-motor system by steady and transient experiments of a hand-tracking task, and confirmed that the hand-motion precedes on the average the target-motion in steady runs within a finite frequency range of the sinusoidal target-motion. The question why and how much the hand-motion should precede was answered by frequency-jump experiments. The results implied that the positive phase-shift of the hand-motion represents the proactive nature of the visual-motor control system which is adaptationally developed for each person to minimize the transient error of the hand-motion when the target-motion changes unexpectedly.

It is critical to co-register the EEG signal and kinematics of motion to measure the continuous iterative loop between brain and body, to this aim, we developed the real-time EEG/robotic system. The project will investigate the brain mechanism of proactive control in which dynamical minimization is achieved, using the functional connectivity and topological analysis.

Project Research Group

Dr. Yoshikatsu Hayashi

Lecturer of Robotics, University of Reading

Prof. Slawomir Nasuto

Professor of Cybernetics, University of Reading

Prof.Yasuji Sawada

Professor of Emeritus in Physics, Tohoku University

Xinzhe Li

PhD, Student, University of Reading