The acting brain Flashcards
There are potentially an infinite number of motor solutions for acting on an object
Degrees of freedom problem
Stored routines that specify certain motor parameters of an action (ex: the relative timing of strokes)
Motor programs
A cluster of perceptual processes that relate to the skin and body, and include touch, pain, thermal sensation and limb position
Somatosensation
Knowledge of the position of the limbs in space
Proprioception
Linking together perceptual knowledge of objects in space and knowledge of the position of one’s body to enable objects to be acted on
Sensorimotor transformation
The problem of explaining volitional acts without assuming a cognitive process that is itself volitional (‘a man within a man’)
Homunculus problem
Responsible for execution of voluntary movements of the body
Primary motor cortex
Damage to one side of the primary motor cortex results in a failure to voluntarily move the other side of the body
Hemiplegia
The sum of the preferred tunings of neurons multiplied by their firing rates
Population vector
The lateral area is important for linking action with visual objects in the environment; the medial area is known as the supplementary motor area and deals with self-generated actions
Premotor cortex
Deals with well-learned actions, particularly action sequences that do not place strong demands on monitoring the environment
Supplementary motor area (SMA)
Repeating an action that has already been performed and is no longer relevant
Perseveration
Impulsively acting on irrelevant objects in the environment
Utilization behavior
An organized set of stored information (ex: of familiar action routines)
Schema
The mechanism that selects one particular schema to be enacted from a host of competing schemas
Contention scheduling
