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H2020Individual fellowship2016–2018

QTMODEM · Quantitative Motor Control for Decision Making

Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2016-07-01 → 2018-06-30
EU contribution
€158,122
Participants
1
Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST

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Results in brief

Quantitative Motor Control for Decision Making

The overall goal of the project has been to provide a theoretical context encompassing motivation, motor control theory and decision-making. There are two major issues being addressed in this project; the first is concerned to how the brain relates incentive motivation to behaviour and whether decision-making abides by the same principles of motor control. The second regards the abnormalities of these motor control principles under Parkinson's disease. The main societal relevance of the project is enabling a wholistic characterization of motivation-related mental states through movement related characterizations, by integrating physiological metrics of motivation into movement related theory. This would operate by first establishing a relationship between non-observable motivation-related physiological processes, to observable and quantifiable metrics of movement, such as velocity, acceleration or shape of movement itself, in a principled fashion. Furthermore, this would indirectly, but importantly, provide a method for the characterization of Parkinson's disease and other motivation related disorders in a principled fashion. The overal objectives are: first, the development of a novel unifying method of neural dynamics, called Quantitative Motor Control for Decision-Making (QTMODEM), aimed at characterizing the process of selection of motor parameters as a function of external stimuli, and most importantly, of incentive motivation for different kinds of movements. Furthermore, we intend to refer the selection of motor parameters to a novel metric of motivation, derived from a characterization of mental states based on electro-encephalographic signals in the context of a controlled experimental setup. Second, as a necessary means to the previous objective, it was necessary to propose and carry out two series of experiments to record both kinematics and electro-encephalography from healthy subjects while varying two factors in a controlled fashion: the nature of their movement and the subjects’ level of incentive motivation.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

The overall goal of this project is to provide a theoretical context encompassing motivation, motor control theory and motor decision-making. How does the brain relate incentive motivation to motor behaviour? How are these principles altered under Parkinson’s disease (PD)? The fact that three of PD’s major motor symptoms: bradykinesia, akinesia and hypokinesia are consistent with a lesser than normal motor invigoration, emphasizes the relationship between motivation and movement, strongly suggesting that PD may be reviewed as a disorder of motivation. This project is concerned with the two major quandaries impending to systematically test this hypothesis: the absence of a normative context relating motivation to motor control theory and the lack of an independent scale of incentive motivation. Therefore, we propose a novel unifying model called Quantitative Motor Control for Decision-Making (QTMODEM) to characterize motor processes as a function of incentive motivation for different kinds of movements. In other words, the QTMODEM intends to formalise the relationship between the selection of motor parameters and an independent metric of motivation derived from electro-encephalography. We will first quantify this relationship with a series of psychophysics experiments with healthy participants by varying two factors: the nature of their movements and the participants’ level of incentive motivation. Second, we will perform experiments with PD patients to gain a quantitative insight into their dysfunctional relationship between motivation and movement statistics. Third, we will build the QTMODEM based on the dynamics of a trade-off between motivation and motor costs, and optimal feedback control theory. Unlike previous models, we predict that the incorporation of motivation into the QTMODEM, will provide the proper normative context for the characterization of the dynamics between motivation and the selection of motor parameters, both under normal and PD conditions.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • UNIVERSIDAD POMPEU FABRA · BarcelonaCoordinatorSpain

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union