paper available

[Lina Massone]

FTP-host: archive.cis.ohio-state.edu
FTP-file: massone.sensorimotor.ps.Z


The following paper has been placed in the Neuroprose archive.

	
			SENSORIMOTOR LEARNING
		
			 Lina L. E. Massone
		   Dept. Of Biomedical Engineering
	  Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
			Northwestern University
	
	(to appear in The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks,
		      Michael A. Arbib Ed., MIT Press.)

The paper does not have an abstract, so what follows are the first few
paragraphs of the introduction and the list of contents.

1. INTRODUCTION
A sensorimotor transformation maps signals from various sensory modalities
into an appropriate set of efferent motor commands to skeletal muscles
or to robotic actuators. Sensorimotor learning refers to the process of
tuning the internal parameters of the various structures of the central 
nervous system (CNS) or of some processing architecture in such a way
that a satisfactory motor performance will result.
Sensorimotor transformations and sensorimotor learning can be viewed
as complex parallel distributed information processing tasks.
A number of different components contribute to the tasks' complexity. 
On the sensory side, signals from various sources (vision, hearing,
touch, pain, proprioception) need to be integrated and interpreted
(Stein and Meredith, 1993). In particular, they need to be translated
into a form that can be used for motor purposes because the coordinates
of afferent sensory signals are different from the coordinates of the
movements they are guiding.  This convergent process, from many parallel
sensory signals to an intermediate internal representation, is referred
to as the early stages in a sensorimotor transformation. A widely accepted
concept that describes the computed internal representation is the
so-called motor program: a specification of the important parameters
of the movement to be executed (Keele and Summers, 1976). Bernstein used
the term motor program to denote a prototype of a planned movement
described with an abstract central language that encodes specific features 
of the movement itself. This idea was then elaborated by Schmidt (1988) 
and modified by Arbib (1990), who introduced the concept of coordinated
control program: a combination of perceptual and motor functional units
called schemas, whose dynamic interaction causes the emergence of behavior.
A different approach was proposed by Schoner and Kelso (1988), who redefined 
motor programs in dynamic terms as transitions between the equilibrium
states of a dynamical system.

			ETC. ETC. ETC. ETC.

2. COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES
	2.1 Coordinate Transformation
	2.2 Forward and Inverse Models
	2.3 Optimization and Learning
	2.4 Representing Information


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