̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - David Franklin

A-Level students pick Cambridge brains

ta385 — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 11:12:55 +0000

Nathan Clark, Noel Fombanu and Lydia Rutherford, 17-year-old students from Lodge Park Academy in Corby, spent their Easter break interviewing leading academics about their research to create audio blogs about neuroscience and modern life.

Having tapped into Cambridge Neuroscience’s cutting-edge research, Lydia, Nathan and Noel asked members of the public for their personal views to broaden the debate.

Lydia, who interviewed Professor Trevor Robbins about drug abuse and dependence, said

“We all had preconceptions about what the researchers would be like. However we were all pleasantly surprised; instead of mad scientists who used terms we couldn’t comprehend … They relayed their knowledge in ways that were accessible which made the interviews very relaxed.”

Listen to Lydia’s audio blog below

Nathan, who interviewed Dr Emma Cahill on the topic of memory and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), said

“Memory is a very important subject as it is part of everyday life so therefore affects every-one. It was also interesting to learn about PTSD because now I know how to aid people with similar problems in the future.”

Listen to Nathan’s audio blog below

Noel, who interviewed engineer Dr David Franklin about the role that neuroscience has to play in robotics, said

“Dr Franklin knew a lot about his field and even allowed me to experience some of the machines that he was working on.”

Listen to Noel’s audio blog below

Dr Hannah Critchlow, who develops and runs public engagement projects with members of Cambridge Neuroscience, said

“It was a pleasure to work with these talented students and watch them interrogate my colleagues with such intelligence and confidence. Lydia, Nathan and Noel not only got to grips with complex research but also mastered the art of interviewing – no mean feat. Their blogs are fascinating.”

̽��ֱ��David Ross Educational Trust establishes educational initiatives and supports other organisations to inspire young people to reach their potential.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is committed to widening participation both at the ̽��ֱ�� itself and in higher education more generally. In 2013-14, the collegiate ̽��ֱ�� delivered 4,000 access events which led to almost 200,000 interactions with school learners and teachers. ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��’s widening participation programme includes college and departmental open days, one of the UKs largest residential summer schools, subject masterclasses, Higher Education Taster Days, a student shadowing scheme and school visits.

Is drug addiction hereditary? Why do emotions dominate our earliest memories? Are robots a threat to humanity? These were just some of the thorny questions posed by A-Level students to Cambridge neuroscientists at a recent outreach event organised with the David Ross Educational Trust.

It was a pleasure to work with these talented students and watch them interrogate my colleagues.

Dr Hannah Critchlow, Cambridge Neuroscience

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Practice really does make perfect

sc604 — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Plymouth ̽��ֱ�� have shown that follow-through – such as when swinging a golf club or tennis racket – can help us to learn two different skills at once, or to learn a single skill faster. ̽��ֱ��research provides new insight into the way tasks are learned, and could have implications for rehabilitation, such as re-learning motor skills following a stroke.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that the particular motor memory which is active and modifiable in the brain at any given time depends on both lead-in and follow-through movement, and that skills which may otherwise interfere can be learned at the same time if their follow-through motions are unique. ̽��ֱ��research is published today (8 January) in the journal Current Biology.

While follow-through in sports such as tennis or golf cannot affect the movement of the ball after it has been hit, it does serve two important purposes: it both helps maximise velocity or force at the point of impact, and helps prevent injuries by allowing a gradual slowdown of a movement.

Now, researchers have found a third important role for follow-through: it allows distinct motor memories to be learned. In other words, by practising the same action with different follow-throughs, different motor memories can be learned for a single movement.

If a new task, whether that is serving a tennis ball or learning a passage on a musical instrument, is repeated enough times, a motor memory of that task is developed. ̽��ֱ��brain is able to store, protect and reactivate this memory, quickly instructing the muscles to perform the task so that it can be performed seemingly without thinking.

̽��ֱ��problem with learning similar but distinct tasks is that they can ‘interfere’ with each other in the brain. For example, tennis and racquetball are both racket sports. However, the strokes for the two sports are slightly different, as topspin is great for a tennis player, but not for a racquetball player. Despite this, in theory it should be possible to learn both sports independently. However, many people find it difficult to perform at a high level in both sports, due to interference between the two strokes.

In order to determine whether we learn a separate motor memory for each task, or a single motor memory for both, the researchers examined either the presence or absence of interference by having participants learn a ‘reaching’ task in the presence of two opposite force-fields.

Participants grasped the handle of a robotic interface and made a reaching movement through an opposing force-field to a central target, followed immediately by a second unopposed follow-through movement to one of two possible final targets. ̽��ֱ��direction of the force-field was changed, representing different tasks, and the researchers were able to examine whether the tasks are learned separately, in which case there would be no interference, or whether we learn the mean of the two opposing force-fields, in which case there would be complete interference.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that the specific motor memory which is active at any given moment depends on the movement that will be made in the near future. When a follow-through movement was made that anticipated the force-field direction, there was a substantial reduction in interference. This suggests that different follow-throughs may activate distinct motor memories, allowing us to learn two different skills without them interfering, even when the rest of the movement is identical. However, while practising a variable follow-through can activate multiple motor memories, practising a consistent follow-through allowed for tasks to be learned much faster.

“There is always noise in our movements, which arrives in the sensory information we receive, the planning we undertake, and the output of our motor system,” said Dr David Franklin of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, a senior author on the research. “Because of this, every movement we make is slightly different from the last one even if we try really hard to make it exactly the same - there will always be variability within our movements and therefore within our follow-through as well.”

When practicing a new skill such as a tennis stroke, we may think that we do not need to care as much about controlling the variability after we hit the ball as it can’t actually affect the movement of the ball itself. “However this research suggests that this variability has another very important point - that it reduces the speed of learning of the skill that is being practiced,” said Franklin.

̽��ֱ��research may also have implications for rehabilitation, such as re-learning skills after a stroke. When trying to re-learn skills after a stroke, many patients actually exhibit a great deal of variability in their movements. “Since we have shown that learning occurs faster with consistent movements, it may therefore be important to consider methods to reduce this variability in order to improve the speed of rehabilitation,” said Dr Ian Howard of Plymouth ̽��ֱ��, the paper’s lead author.

̽��ֱ��work was supported by the Wellcome Trust, Human Frontier Science Program, Plymouth ̽��ֱ�� and the Royal Society.

New research into the way in which we learn new skills finds that a single skill can be learned faster if its follow-through motion is consistent, but multiple skills can be learned simultaneously if the follow-through motion is varied.

Every movement we make is slightly different from the last one even if we try really hard to make it exactly the same

David Franklin

Johan

Rafael Nadal @ Roland Garros

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Just made coffee while chatting to a friend? Time to thank your ‘visuomotor binding’ mechanism…

amb206 — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:00:00 +0000

We talk about being ‘on automatic’ when we’re describing carrying out a familiar series of actions without being aware of what we’re doing.

Now researchers have for the first time found evidence that a dedicated information highway or ‘visuomotor binding’ mechanism connects what we see with what we do. This mechanism helps us to coordinate our movements in order to carry out all kinds of tasks from dunking a biscuit in your coffee, while maintaining eye contact with someone else, to playing basketball on a crowded court.

̽��ֱ��UCL-led research (published yesterday in the journal Current Biology) was a collaboration between Dr Alexandra Reichenbach, of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, and Dr David Franklin, of the Computational and Biological Learning Lab at Cambridge’s Department of Engineering.

Their research suggests that a specialised mechanism for spatial self-awareness links visual cues with body motion. ̽��ֱ��finding could help us understand the feeling of disconnection reported by schizophrenia patients and could also explain why people with even the most advanced prosthetic limbs find it hard to coordinate their movements.

Standard visual processing relies on us being able to ignore distractions and pay attention to objects of interest while filtering out others. “ ̽��ֱ��study shows that our brains also have separate hard-wired systems to track our own bodies visually even when we are not paying attention to them,” explained Franklin. “This allows visual attention to focus on objects in the world around us rather than on our own movements.”

̽��ֱ��newly-discovered mechanism was identified when three experiments were carried out on 52 healthy adults. In all three experiments, participants used robotic interfaces to control cursors on two-dimensional displays, where cursor motion was directly linked to hand movement. They were asked to keep their eyes fixed on the centre of the screen, a requirement checked by eye tracking. “ ̽��ֱ��robotic virtual reality system allowed us to instantaneously manipulate visual feedback independently of the physical movement of the body,” said Franklin.

In the first experiment, participants controlled two separate cursors – equally close to the centre of the screen – with their right and left hands. Their goal was to guide each cursor to a corresponding target at the top of the screen. Occasionally the cursor or target on each side would jump left or right, requiring participants to take corrective action. Each jump was ‘cued’ by a flash on one side, but this was random and did not always correspond to the side about to change.

Not surprisingly, people reached faster to cursor jumps when their attention was drawn to the ‘correct’ side by the cue. However, reactions to jumps were fast regardless of cuing, suggesting that a separate mechanism independent of attention is responsible for tracking our movements.

“ ̽��ֱ��first experiment showed us that we react very quickly to changes relating to objects directly under our own control, even when we are not paying attention to them,” explained Reichenbach. “This provides strong evidence for a dedicated neural pathway linking motor control to visual information, independently of the standard visual systems that are dependent on attention.”

̽��ֱ��second experiment was similar to the first but introduced changes in brightness to demonstrate the attention effect on the visual perception system. In the third experiment, participants were asked to guide one cursor to its target in the presence of up to four dummy targets or cursors, acting as ‘distractors’ alongside the real ones. In this experiment, responses to cursor jumps were less affected by distractors than responses to target jumps. Reactions to cursor jumps remained strong with one or two distractors but decreased significantly in the presence of four.

“These results provide further evidence of a dedicated visuomotor binding mechanism that is less prone to distractions than standard visual processing,” said Reichenbach. “It looks like the specialised system has a higher tolerance for distractions but in the end it is effected by them. Exactly why we evolved a separate mechanism remains to be seen but the need to react rapidly to different visual clues about ourselves and the environment may have enough to necessitate a separate pathway.”

For more information about this story contact Alexandra Buxton, Office of Communications, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk, 01223 761673

Experiments have identified a dedicated information highway that combines visual cues with body motion. This mechanism triggers responses to cues before the conscious brain has become aware of them.

̽��ֱ��study shows that our brains also have separate hard-wired systems to track our own bodies visually even when we are not paying attention to them.

David Franklin

Jenny Downing

Dunking a cookie into a cup of coffee

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