News

The Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) visited the Neuromechanics Lab to learn about our work and engage in hands-on demonstrations of our movement analysis tools! Approximately 40 ninth-grade students toured the lab and learned about our research from Erik Summerside and Megan O'Brien. This event was coordinated through...

Alison won the Best Podium award at the fifth annual meeting of the Rocky Mountain American Society of Biomechanics. Her presentation, entitled "Trial-to-trial adaptation of standing postural control," was warmly received by the biomechanics community, students and faculty alike. Congratulations, Aly!

Our paper on the influence of reward on motor learning has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Neurophysiology. Adding rewarding feedback when learning a new motor task leads to faster learning. See our Publications page for more details.

In a recent study, we measured muscle activity and metabolic cost as subjects adapted to a visuomotor rotation. Surprisingly we observed increases in both muscle activity, coactivation, and metabolic cost, even though the perturbation was solely kinematic. Perhaps muscle coactivation is a fundamental strategy used in the presence of uncertainty,...

The National Science Foundation has awarded Alaa their prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for her proposal entitled “The Neuroeconomics of Metabolic Cost in Movement Decision Making". The NSF CAREER Award recognizes young faculty members with five-year grants to support outstanding research projects and career development activities, including education...

Alison's paper, Transfer of postural adaptation depends on context of prior exposure , is accepted just in time for the New Year! Our findings demonstrate that transfer of postural adapation between stance widths depends on the context in which the task was initially learned.

Helen Huang's paper, Older adults learn less, but still reduce metabolic cost, during motor adaptation , on the effect of age on motor learning is published in Journal of Neurophysiology.

We have recently received an Oculus Rift head-mounted display. We have begun devloping immersive, virtual environments for human subjects experiments. Combining this device with other commodity-grade equipment, such as the Wiimote, Wii balance board, and Microsoft Kinect, allows us to create an inexpensive system that can be used for learning...

Our study on metabolic cost reductions during motor learning has been receiving more attention in the media: TIME: Over-Practicing Makes Perfect PBS: Science Smart Importance Over Learning

Mickey's study on risk-sentisitvity in motor adaptation is published in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience .