Investigating contextual effects in motor learning

This PhD position will involve investigating visually guided human hand movements to better understand aspects of human sensori motor control. In particular it will look at issues that affect movement performance and why there are some context that enable us to easily learn novel tasks and others that do not. The PhD work will be based in a human motor neuroscience laboratory in Plymouth, and the student will be expected to recruit participants and run experimental studies. To do so, training will be provided by the supervisory team. At the start of the project the student will run experiments which have already been set up by the research team, to facilitate learning of how to develop and conduct experimental studies. Later in the PhD it is expected that the student will come up with their own research questions and experimental paradigms, to investigate additional aspects of human motor control. These could involve manipulations of the movement task dynamics or its visual environment. The work will be carried out by running movement experiment on human participants using a vBot robotic manipulandum operating in a two-dimensional virtual environment. This enables movements to be tracked and recorded while the visual feedback and dynamics of a given task are manipulated.