This course will provide students with a thorough background in the neurobiological and functional properties of the human motor system. The content is aimed at providing students with an understanding of many of the important principles and modern theories in motor planning, control, estimation, prediction, learning and coordination necessary to conduct, critically evaluate, and disseminate research of the motor system. This will be achieved by providing a multi-disciplinary overview of motor control, covering theoretical and experimental work from the fields of biomechanics, computational neuroscience, experimental psychology and robotics, and focusing on the hierarchical organization of the motor system considered from a neuroanatomical, neurophysiological and cognitive point of view.

Neurobiological aspects. This course will provide a detailed overview of the neurobiological basis of the hierarchically organized human motor control system, including the (sub)cortical structures involved in the planning and execution of movements, the peripheral neuromuscular system and its specific biophysical make-up, and the various reflex mechanisms involved in motion. Fields that will be covered are neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, biomechanics, and psychonomics.

Functional aspects. We will focus on eye, head, and arm movements, as well as on walking, drawing and handwriting. Research paradigms that are promising for future neurocognitive research, stemming from experimental psychology and human movement science, will be discussed.

Theoretical/quantitative aspects. An overview will be presented of the theoretical models of the planning and execution of movements that address problems related to solving inverse kinematics and inverse dynamics of kinematically redundant limbs, feedforward and feedback mechanisms in motor systems, learning and self-organization and cognitive constraints which affect human motor performance. All models will be discussed in the context of available experimental data.

Additional aspects. Where relevant, implications of theories, models and research findings for applied and clinical research purposes will be discussed. Part of the course will focus on experimental methods for studying human motor control, including analysis tools like computational modelling and rigid-body analysis, EMG, EEG, MEG, and fMRI.