Our motor skills determine how well we perform in athletics, dance, music, and in carrying out countless daily chores. While our proficiency at performing individual actions and synthesizing them into seamless sequences limits our athletic and artistic talents, we are not perpetually bound by such limitations. The nervous system can acquire new, and modify old, motor behaviors through experience and practice. That is motor learning.The Acquisition of Motor Behavior in Vertebratesprovides a broad, multidisciplinary survey of recent research on the brain systems and mechanisms underlying motor learning. Following the editors' introduction, nineteen contributions report on the neurobiology of these higher brain functions and on diverse types of motor learning such as reflex adaptation, conditioned and instrumental reflex learning, visually guided actions, and complex sequences and skills.

Sports Science.

Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement is an interdisciplinary volume with contributions from philosophers, cognitive scientists, and movement therapists. Part one provides the phenomenologically grounded definition of body memory with its different typologies. Part two follows the aim to integrate phenomenology, conceptual metaphor theory, and embodiment approaches from the cognitive sciences for the development of appropriate empirical methods to address body memory. Part three inquires into the forms and effects of therapeutic work with body memory, based on the integration of theory, empirical findings, and clinical applications. It focuses on trauma treatment and the healing power of movement. The book also contributes to metaphor theory, application and research, and therefore addresses metaphor researchers and linguists interested in the embodied grounds of metaphor. Thus, it is of particular interest for researchers from the cognitive sciences, social sciences, and humanities as well as clinical practitioners.

There are many difficulties hindering western scientists from becoming acquainted with Russian scientific literature, including both political and language barriers. Russian science has a long and proud tradition going back as far as Peter the Great and the founding of the Russian Academy of Science in 1725. However, Russian neuroscientists from th

The colloquium on "Imaging of Cognitive Function" speaks to the many audiences whose interests relate to efforts to map cognitive processes in the human brain. There are things of great interest in this collection of papers for specialists in cognition and neuroscience and imaging science as well as in disciplines interested in human development through education and training and others with intrinsic interest in the latest information on how the human brain supports thought. The papers were presented at a meeting sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences in its western home the Beckman Center at the University of California, Irvine.

This book is concerned with the involvement of the cerebellum in learning and remembering motor tasks. It is unique in discussing plasticity at both the cellular and at the behavioral level.

Covers the basic sciences relevant to recovery of function following injury to the nervous system.

Recent advances in motor behavior research rely on detailed knowledge of the characteristics of the neurons and networks that generate motor behavior. At the cellular level, Neurons, Networks, and Motor Behavior describes the computational characteristics of individual neurons and how these characteristics are modified by neuromodulators. At the network and behavioral levels, the volume discusses how network structure is dynamically modulated to produce adaptive behavior. Comparisons of model systems throughout the animal kingdom provide insights into general principles of motor control. Contributors describe how networks generate such motor behaviors as walking, swimming, flying, scratching, reaching, breathing, feeding, and chewing. An emerging principle of organization is that nervous systems are remarkably efficient in constructing neural networks that control multiple tasks and dynamically adapt to change.The volume contains six sections: selection and initiation of motor patterns; generation and formation of motor patterns: cellular and systems properties; generation and formation of motor patterns: computational approaches; modulation and reconfiguration; short-term modulation of pattern generating circuits; and sensory modification of motor output to control whole body orientation.

Brain Mechanisms for the Integration of Posture and Movement