Neuromuscular-cognitive interactions in sensorimotor decision making

Introduction

Successfully interacting with one’s environment requires a rich interplay of perceptual judgement and neuromuscular control, with each taking account of the other in real time. Miscalculations in this accounting, as happens in demanding sensorimotor tasks (e.g. sports), cognitive and motor disorders, or with age-related decline, can have serious consequences.

Background

Despite the huge growth in modelling and neurophysiological studies of perceptual decision making, the critical role played by neuromuscular processes has been largely neglected due to challenges in parsing distinct effects of sensory, cognitive, and motor processing in the brain.

Computational Framework

Our recently developed computational framework for jointly modelling behaviour with well-characterised neurophysiological signatures of sensorimotor decision formation now provides a means to overcome this parsing problem, offering a window onto the hierarchy of cortical processing involved.

Project Goals

MYODECISION will capitalise on this advance to develop new decision paradigms that interface directly with muscle outputs, making the participants active agents in meeting changing neuromuscular demands. This will help resolve major outstanding questions regarding how sensory and motor systems interact in the brain.

Research Objectives

1. Investigate how people adjust sensorimotor processes to meet changing time and effort demands on their motor outputs, including:

   • Fine-grained manipulations of muscle-activation strength requirements
   • Speed pressure
   • Effort biases

2. Use open- and closed-loop stimulus perturbations to probe how these processes underpin dynamic changes of mind that rescue erroneous behaviours.

3. Develop a robust approach to neurally-constrained modelling aimed at examining individual differences in decision making in challenging sensorimotor environments.

Conclusion

This work will offer the field a transformative paradigm for probing latent psychological processes in more ecologically representative decision scenarios.