Dr. Pratik Mutha
Jibaben Patel Chair Associate Professor, Biological Engineering & Cognitive and Brain Science, IIT Gandhinagar
Title: The sharing of motor memories across effectors
Date: Wednesday, 23rd March 2022
Time: 03:30 pm (IST)
Link: https://bit.ly/IITDCogSci20220323
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Abstract
Movement practice, whether it is of a basketball dribble or a complex dance form, results in the formation of a “motor” memory. Remarkably, this memory comprises of shared, effector-independent components that can result in enhanced performance in an untrained effector. For example, a basketball player who learns to dribble with the right arm will often show behavioural gains in the left arm even though he/she may not have been trained on the left side. How do humans build such shared motor representations? In this talk, I will present our work that employs psychophysical experiments, computational modeling and brain stimulation in humans to reveal that such representations are encoded via implicit mechanisms that evolve gradually during learning and depend on intact processing within the left posterior parietal cortex. These results shed new light on the contributions of association cortices to the learning and memory of new motor acts.
About the Speaker
Pratik Mutha is a Jibaben Patel Chair and Associate Professor at the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar. He completed his PhD from Pennsylvania State University, USA and is the recipient of the Ramanujan Fellowship. His research interests lie in investigating Motor Control and Rehabilitation, focusing on the underlying principles and brain mechanisms that mediate the control of our actions, and to decipher how this control breaks down in case of damage to the brain.