Speaker：Prof. Stephen Scott

Time： Sep. 9, 10:00 - 11:00, a.m.

Venue：Room 1113, Wangkezhen Building

Host：Prof. Kunlin Wei

Abstract

Sports such as soccer highlight our amazing ability to move and interact in a complex world. A player can skate past a defenseman and shoot a puck over the glove side of a goalie. Even if the defenseman knocks the player while going past, great players quickly adjust or even change where they shoot the puck to his or her advantage. Our ability to make such rapid motor “decisions” is captured within the framework of optimal feedback control, in which a control policy specifies how one ought to move given the present state of the body (position and motion).

My presentation will highlight the use of small mechanical and/or visual disturbances to probe how the motor system deals with a variety of behavioural contexts. These studies demonstrate that the motor system can generate surprisingly complex motor corrections to mechanical disturbances in as little as 60ms, including the influence of goal redundancy and avoidance of obstacles. In contrast, visual feedback begins at ~90ms, but only considers task-related factors at ~120ms. The fact that visual feedback is slower than proprioceptive feedback makes the latter dominate feedback control during motor actions. I will also describe experiments demonstrating a role of frontoparietal cortical circuits in these fast feedback processes. Taken together, this work suggests that the voluntary motor system does not simply generate a pattern of muscle activity to attain a goal (i.e. motor program). Rather, it creates a broad range of strategies and contingencies to attain a behavioural goal that can be expressed dependent on how the motor action unfolds, thus blurring the line between motor planning (decisions) and motor control.

Bio

现任皇后大学健康科学研究院副院长（研究），并任生物医学及分子科学系教授、Kinarm 联合创始人兼首席科学官， 加拿大皇家学会会士.Scott教授长期聚焦人类自主运动控制的神经机制与行为机制，并通过人类及非人灵长类模型，揭示大脑如何规划、执行与调节复杂运动行为。其研究成果为理解神经功能、运动控制障碍及神经康复评估提供了重要的科学基础。其团队开发的 Kinarm 机器人平台，在脑功能障碍、神经损伤量化评估和康复训练研究中的应用广泛，是基础研究与临床研究领域的重要技术工具。

2026-09-04