Studying Skill Acquisition
Professor Dagmar Sternad is appointed to both Biology and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University.
The central interest of research in the Action Lab is the control and coordination of goal-directed human behavior. What organizational principles are at work in movement coordination? What perceptual information is used to coordinate the complex neuromuscular structure? The theoretical framework that pervades our studies interprets the actor in the environment as a dynamical system, which is high-dimensional, nonlinear, and capable of producing coordinated and adaptive behavior. More specifically, our research agenda focuses on single- and multi- joint human movements in perceptually specified tasks. We pursue a three-pronged research strategy consisting of: (1) an empirical component with behavioral experiments on human subjects, (2) theoretical work which develops mathematical models for movement generation on the basis of coupled dynamical systems, and (3) brain imaging studies that investigate the cerebral activity accompanying movement. More recently, we have extended these experimental paradigms to neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and split-brain patients, and the elderly.
Learn more here