Grant: Operating Grant

Eye-hand coordination is central to the basic life-skills, work, and recreational activities of all people. Eye-hand coordination is more complicated than we generally assume, because it depends on proper vision, eye movements, perception, cognition, and arm control. Consequently, it breaks down in many diseases, developmental disorders, and injuries of the central nervous system. The purpose of this project is to understand how the brain uses vision to guide arm movements, and how this degrades during brain damage and across the normal lifespan. We will test how the cerebral cortex represents movement goals in sensory space and transforms this into actions. We will test how humans incorporate different types of complex perceptual information into their movement plans. Finally, we will explore how these processes fail to develop or decline with age, and test a paradigm that we developed from our last grant for rehabilitation of patients with cortical damage.