Grant: Project Grant

The ability to skillfully interact with objects is critical in most daily tasks and, therefore, impairments to this ability, which often occur following stroke or neurological disease, are particularly devastating. To date research on object manipulation has focused on simple object lifting movements. However, real-world action tasks, such as making a cup of tea or preparing a meal, involve interacting with multiple objects as they are lifted, moved about in space, and lifted again. Skilled performance of such tasks requires keeping track of the weights of the objects based on their appearance and, especially when handling similar looking objects, their location. Thus, not only do manipulation tasks require declarative and spatial memory resources, involved in encoding the properties (e.g., weight) and locations of objects, they engage an 'episodic-like' memory that, as the task unfolds, links object weights to particular locations at particular points in time. This raises the provocative idea that medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures, which have been implicated in episodic, declarative and spatial memory, are engaged in object manipulation tasks. The broad objective of this research project is to investigate, using advanced neuroimaging methods, the role of MTL structures in the planning and control of object manipulation tasks. Motivated by extremely promising initial results, the proposed experiments will test a series of highly novel hypotheses about how MTL structures encode and combine information about object weights and locations during manipulation tasks.