Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Tasks such as playing the piano or hitting a tennis ball require the careful orchestration of several neuromuscular elements and processes. Although all voluntary actions require timing, timed repetitive movements involve moving periodically while maintaining a fixed relationship with a sensorimotor event. The question of how the Central Nervous system (CNS) organizes the timing aspect of such repetitive motor actions is an important one in Cognitive Psychology, Behavioural Neuroscience and Motor Control. Research in motor timing has dealt with the analysis of synchronization errors, identification of sources of variability in synchronization and the determination of underlying neural structures. While a large amount of research has gone into characterizing the nature and propagation of errors in timed actions, much less is known about how movement trajectories contribute to accuracy in timing. The question of how bimanual coordinative stability is related to sensed error correction processes also remains unanswered. The overall objective of the proposed research programme is to further advance our understanding of the neural and behavioural mechanisms of timing in motor behaviour by experimentally investigating error correction processes and their relationship to movement trajectories in 1) repetitive responding tasks (in normal and altered visco-elastic environments) and 2) bimanual and interlimb coordination tasks. Experimental work will be complemented by computational modeling. This research programme will integrate methods from the information processing and dynamical systems approaches with the goal of synthesizing a unified theory of motor timing.