Control of Arm Movement in Space

How does the human brain control hand and arm movement? Can artificial systems copy the powerful capacity of the human brain? The many groups researching these questions will find interdisciplinary co-operation and a new outlook in this report. The study proposes a direct comparison between current computational development and new experimental results from neurophysiology and neurophysics. The book covers different levels of neural spinal cord, red nucleus, premotor cortex, motor cortex, parietal cortex, thalamus and cerebellum. An important place is assigned to the problems of muscle co-ordination, internal representations of movement variables in different nervous regions and co-ordinate transformations underlying reaching and manipulation. For the physiologist, the book provides a theoretical basis for better understanding of how neuronal populations code movement centrally. For neural network and robotics researchers, it provides theories of how the brain controls arm movement and new concepts and ideas of how to generate more efficient artificial systems.