Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 12.1
The existence in brain of “internal models” can mimic the input/output
characteristics, or their inverses, of the motor apparatus (Kawato, Wolpert, 1998).
encoding is the meaning of the sensation, from the neural transmission coming
from sensory receptors to our brain, this is also analyzed. This requires the appli-
cation of information from long-term memory to organize, classify and interpret
our sensations. In other words, perception changes sensation data into perceived
information or meaning. The Central Processing tasks are to make the decision
on the kind of movement to respond. It could use past experiences, also by using
the long-term memory, in order to formulate a course or action. Responding is an
action plan, step-by-step sequence of events that make up the planned movement.
On the other hand, the motor theory of perception illustrated by Berthoz
(1997), presented the concept that perception is not a passive mechanism for re-
ceiving and interpreting sensory data, but that is the active process of anticipating
the sensory consequences of an action, and thereby binding the sensory and motor
patterns in a coherent framework. In computational terms, it implies the existence
in the brain of some kind of “internal models” as a bridge between action and
perception
(Figure 12.1
).
The recent control learning models are based on the idea
that instructions generated by the brain for controlling a movement are utilized by
the brain to interpret the sensory consequences of the movement (Kawato, 1992).
From the above introduction of the literature on motor control, a high com-
plexity of understanding processes has been briefly outlined (Solis, 2004). Motor
skills are extremely complex, involving sensory and motor operations in a highly
interactive way. Even the “simplest” motor action, like clicking a button, requires
an enormous number of cerebral connections. Furthermore, the motor learning
