Saturday, June 28, 2008

Monkey intentions and control of a robotic arm

ResearchBlogging.org
In a brief departure from a current catch-up I'm doing on glia, I want to catch up some old posts, thoughts, themes and developments to do with the brain as movement simulator.

In reference to blogposts The devil is in the Details (Dec 18/07), More on Learning (Dec 21/07), and The User Illusion, Dec. 22/07:

Today Deric Bownds Mindblog post featured a short piece about a big big topic:
Science Hack - monkey brain moving robotic arm. Readers can follow the links and find the great little video - as usual, a food reward proved to be the most effective for getting a monkey to neuroplasticize its brain... this monkey can't move its own arm but it learned to move the robotic one to reach food and put it into its own mouth. Remarkable. It appears that with the right motivation a brain can learn whatever it needs to.

Additional Reading:
Differences Between Intention-Based and Stimulus-Based Actions (12 page pdf)
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