Wing, Professor Alan

Art and Mind

http://www.symon.bham.ac.uk/people/alan.htm

I am interested in anticipatory aspects of human movement control. Such actions are critically dependent on the orderly, coordinated recruitment of many muscles. However, also important is the selection and integration of sensory information coming from visual, vestibular and proprioceptive sources. This sensory input may be used as feedback to adjust movements that fail to attain their target. But the information also serves to correct inaccurate stored information about the environment and / or the effector system, so reducing the likelihood of correction being required on another occasion.

An important goal for research is to understand how the brain uses sensory input to develop and maintain accurate representations (internal models) for adaptive planning and control of movement. When we imagine an action, there is a feeling of it taking place which has a distinct time course; indeed it has been shown that the duration of imagined action is very similar to the corresponding real movement. It is conceivable that internal models which underlie overt movement contribute to imagining movement and current research asks whether imagined movement evolves in parallel with sensory induced changes in internal models.