Pre-Requisite(s): None

Content:

Introduction to the course: Definition and application in real life; biological bases of Motor systems– motor and premotor cortices, parietal and frontal cortices, basal ganglia and cerebellum; approaches to studying motor learning – definition and measuring motor learning, designing experiments on learning, alternative methods for measuring learning, issues about “amount” of learning, understanding differences between learning and changes in performance; learning strategies of motor sequences – implicit versus explicit learning, chunking, role of sleep, neural basis, disruption in different brain disorders; adaptation learning – adaptation to novel dynamical and visual perturbations, sensory signals responsible for adaptation, generalization and transfer of learning, elementary computational models; learning under unstable and unpredictable conditions – motor noise, impedance control, feedforward and feedback components of impedance control; motor skill learning – use dependent learning, “model-free”; reinforcement learning, neural basis; Vocal learning in songbirds – role of variability and use of exploration, critical period, neural circuits, application to human speech learning

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