Human & Animal Behaviour

To investigate how the brain controls reaching movements we use robotic exoskeletons that allow us to control every aspect of how the arm moves and what visual information subjects see. We are currently using these state-of-the-art tools to understand how what we expect to experience in the future affects how we plan our movements, and to bridge behavioural findings between humans and non-human primates.

Understanding human behaviour requires research both in highly controlled experiments as well as naturalistic tasks and environments. We are developing methods for markerlessly tracking arm and hand movements during tasks that span everyday behaviours, while also wirelessly recording from many muscles of the arm and hand. These methods are designed to work flexibly and automatically, and in future work we will transfer these methods to the clinic to quantify behaviour, track changes, and to aid in early diagnosis.