Cognitive components of sensorimotor adaptation and motor planning in manual action

The development of appropriate representations for manual action episodes and their coordination to more complex action sequences still poses a major challenge for robotics. It is a natural approach to gain insight to these topics from a cognitive and experimental perspective revealing the development of sensorimotor representations in humans accomplishing those complex tasks. Especially, it is interesting to learn about the relationship between the structure of representations and the performance in the execution of sensorimotor tasks, like sequential object manipulations. Hence, one of the most interesting questions is what kind of representation helps people to con-trol actions.

This project focuses on the question of how structures of sensorimotor representa-tions are established and gradually changed, while considering the physical properties of objects, task constraints (affordances) and perceptual discordances in sensorimotor adaptation tasks.