Grant: Project Grant

The human brain's capacity to learn new motor commands is fundamental to almost all activities we engage in. Indeed, it is not only essential when we acquire novel skills, such as learning to play a musical instrument, but it is also required on a daily basis as we adapt to changes in our environment, interact with new objects, and refine existing skills. As such, impairments in sensorimotor learning, which often occur following stroke and neurological disease, can be particularly devastating. Gaining a better understanding of the neural bases of sensorimotor learning is essential for characterizing these impairments and for developing more effective therapies for rehabilitation. The broad goal of the proposed research is to better understand, at the level of interacting whole-brain networks, the role of cognitive brain systems in driving human sensorimotor learning. The proposed work will employ a combination of behavioural, neuroimaging and computational approaches to characterize how brain regions change their interactions during learning, and how these changes relate to individual differences in learning ability. This work will produce important new knowledge that can be leveraged in characterizing and treating many of the core sensorimotor and cognitive deficits that result from brain disorders and disease.