Motor Intention

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

Healthy humans effortlessly and accurately perform a wide range of voluntary movements and actions. Considerable work has revealed many brain sites involved in performing voluntary actions, including areas in the frontal and parietal cortices. By contrast, substantially less is known about brain areas which are involved in the intention to move and when and how these intention-related brain sites mediate movement planning. The current project will use neuroimaging to identify regions in the human cerebral cortex that contribute to planning and preparing voluntary movements. They will also use and novel mathematical methods and analysis tools to describe when each brain region becomes involved in the action planning and the interactions among brain regions. The project outcome will yield a spatial and temporal map of brain activity related to action intention. Broader impacts of this project include development of analysis tools that can to assess patterns of brain activity related to basic human functions of sensation, perception, thought and action. The methods may also be useful to any system that has sets of time-varying signals, particularly brain-computer interfaces. The project will involve graduate and undergraduate students, some of whom participate in K though 12 outreach programs; thus, the research activities will become disseminated to the local public community.