Mental Optometry: The Mind’s Eye, You Go Where You’re Looking

The term, Mental Optometry, is newly developed concept that can be used to describe the interplay between mind, brain, and sensory interpretations. Taken from the premise of behavioral optometry and research explaining body orientation to physical field of vision, what we see or perceive with our mind’s eye, emotions and behaviors will also follow in the same manner. While not explicitly referred to in such a manner, cognitive, cognitive behavioral, and cognitive bias formation theories imply such a concept as being foundational to their systems. Mental Optometry arms the theorist and practitioner with a neurobiological empowered understanding of mood, emotion, thought, and interpretations of visual stimuli such that therapeutic interventions can be developed to assist patients in recognizing and altering skewed interpretations of what they think they see (the mind’s eye) – imagery that may deleteriously support negative cognitions leading to negative mood states

Respiratory, postural and spatio-kinetic motor stabilization, internal models, top-down timed motor coordination and expanded cerebello-cerebral circuitry: a review

Human dexterity, bipedality, and song/speech vocalization in Homo are reviewed within a motor evolution perspective in regard to 

(i) brain expansion in cerebello-cerebral circuitry, 
(ii) enhanced predictive internal modeling of body kinematics, body kinetics and action organization, 
(iii) motor mastery due to prolonged practice, 
(iv) task-determined top-down, and accurately timed feedforward motor adjustment of multiple-body/artifact elements, and 
(v) reduction in automatic preflex/spinal reflex mechanisms that would otherwise restrict such top-down processes. 

Dual-task interference and developmental neuroimaging research argues that such internal modeling based motor capabilities are concomitant with the evolution of 
(vi) enhanced attentional, executive function and other high-level cognitive processes, and that 
(vii) these provide dexterity, bipedality and vocalization with effector nonspecific neural resources. 

The possibility is also raised that such neural resources could 
(viii) underlie human internal model based nonmotor cognitions. 
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From Parallel Sequence Representations to Calligraphic Control: A Conspiracy of Neural Circuits

Calligraphic writing presents a rich set of challenges to the human movement control system. These challenges include: initial learning, and recall from memory, of prescribed stroke sequences; critical timing of stroke onsets and durations; fine control of grip and contact forces; and letter-form invariance under voluntary size scaling, which entails fine control of stroke direction and amplitude during recruitment and derecruitment of musculoskeletal degrees of freedom. Experimental and computational studies in behavioral neuroscience have made rapid progress toward explaining the learning, planning and contTOl exercised in tasks that share features with calligraphic writing and drawing. This article summarizes computational neuroscience models and related neurobiological data that reveal critical operations spanning from parallel sequence representations to fine force control. Part one addresses stroke sequencing. It treats competitive queuing (CQ) models of sequence representation, performance, learning, and recall. Part two addresses letter size scaling and motor equivalence. It treats cursive handwriting models together with models in which sensory-motor tmnsformations are performed by circuits that learn inverse differential kinematic mappings. Part three addresses fine-grained control of timing and transient forces, by treating circuit models that learn to solve inverse dynamics problems.National Institutes of Health (R01 DC02852

Stepping Responses to Treadmill Perturbations vary with Severity of Motor Deficits in Human SCI

In this study, we investigated the responses to tread perturbations during human stepping on a treadmill. Our approach was to test the effects of perturbations to a single leg using a split-belt treadmill in healthy participants and in participants with varying severity of spinal cord injury (SCI). We recruited 11 people with incomplete SCI and 5 noninjured participants. As participants walked on an instrumented treadmill, the belt on one side was stopped or accelerated briefly during mid to late stance. A majority of participants initiated an unnecessary swing when the treadmill was stopped in mid stance, although the likelihood of initiating a step was decreased in participants with more severe SCI. Accelerating or decelerating one belt of the treadmill during stance altered the characteristics of swing. We observed delayed swing initiation when the belt was decelerated (i.e. the hip was in a more flexed position at time of swing) and advanced swing initiation with acceleration (i.e. hip extended at swing initiation). Further, the timing and leg posture of heel strike appeared to remain constant, reflected by a sagittal plane hip angle at heel strike that remained the same regardless of the perturbation. In summary, our results supported the current understanding of the role of sensory feedback and central drive in the control of stepping in participants with incomplete SCI and noninjured participants. In particular, the observation of unnecessary swing during a stop perturbation highlights the interdependence of central and sensory drive in walking control

Brake Motion Control for Quadruped Hopping Robot by Using Reference Height Control System

In this paper, the generation of brake motion control for our developed quadruped hopping robot while moving on two dimensional spaces by jumping continuously is discussed. The braking motion method which is approached is by applying the reference height control system to create the differences of front leg and back leg while making moving performance and correct the body posture which has inclined to make the quadruped hopping robot jump vertically while braking performances. On the other hand, this approached method can be used as the collision-avoidance behavior for the quadruped hopping robot. The MATLAB/Simulink model is used in order to conduct the pattern generation of quadruped hopping robot. As the result, effectiveness of approach method is confirmed to generate brake motion control of quadruped hopping robot while making continuous jumping vertically. Copyright © 2013 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserve