News from the Center
A new look!
In 2004, the Brain Sciences Center unveiled a new website designed to help raise public awareness of brain research. Today, our site has a new look! We hope you find it visually-pleasing and user-friendly. For the time being, you may still visit our old site at: http://www.brain.umn.edu/index_old.htm
2009 American Legion Family Brain Sciences Award
Brain Sciences graduate students Aurelio Alonso and Vasileios Christopoulos were awarded the 2009 American Legion Family Brain Sciences Award on Wednesday, September 11th during the 15th Annual American Legion and University of Minnesota Lecture in Brain Sciences. The lecture, "Circuits & circuit disorders of the basal ganglia: surgical repair", was was given by Mahlon DeLong, M.D., W.P. Timmie Professor of Neurology at Emory University School of Medicine. Photo (above) l-r: Jim Kellogg, president of the Brain Science Foundation; Lloyd Schaeffer and Bill Peters, Sons of the American Legion; and Dan Ludwig, past-National Commander, American Legion, award recipient Vasileios Christopoulos.
Conferences
BSC Researcher Roger Dumas recently returned from the 2009 Society for Music Perception & Cognition meeting in Indianapolis, where he presented a poster entitled "Neural processing of pitch as revealed by MEG". Along with fellow investigators Scott Lipscomb (School of Music, UofM), Art Leuthold and Apostolos Georgopoulos, Roger discovered subnetworks in the human brain that process musical pitches when they are presented randomly. The team is now investigating how these networks encode pitches in melodic sequences.
Publications
On September 3rd, PLOS Computational Biology accepted a paper by Vasileios Christopoulos and Paul Schrater (Psychology & Computer Science) entitled, "Grasping objects with environmentally induced position uncertainty".
Summary:
Optimal sensorimotor control models actions as decisions that maximize the desirableness of outcomes, where the desirableness is captured by an expected cost or utility to each action sequence. These models provide explanations for many aspects of our ability to compensate for uncertainty, but they have not been applied to understanding purposive movements – movements involving the application of forces to change the relative position of objects and the actor in the environment. Using time efficiency as a natural cost function, we present a statistical optimal control analysis of uncertainty compensation strategies in a purposive movement task, grasping an object with directional position uncertainty. In accord with the predictions of the analysis, the experimental results showed that people compensate for uncertainty by adopting grasp strategies that increase the chance to produce a stable grasp at first contact. Our findings suggest that visuomotor system plans for uncertainty even in complex purposive movements.
