Research Projects

This proposal aims to explore the non-invasive extraction of early muscle recruitment from humans performing reach and saccade tasks, their information conveying, and how they may be gated by task demands. The research is based on findings that motor recruitment patterns parallel aspects of motor planning observed in the oculomotor system, such as planning saccades and saccade sequences. The proposal aims to extend these results to humans performing head and hand movement tasks. Three specific aims will be pursued: 1) characterizing the recruitment pattern of individual motor units using high density surface EMG activity; 2) testing stochastic accumulation to threshold and race models that link motor recruitment patterns to movement initiation and control; and 3) using non-invasive neuro-stimulation to test the role of the prefrontal cortex in flexible sensorimotor gating of muscle activity recruitment. The research could potentially lead to the development of an assistive non-invasive brain machine interface that decodes intentional signals from motor unit activity before movement generation.