title: Neural development and sensorimotor control
creator: Konczak, Jürgen
subject: Developmental Psychology
subject: Behavioral Neuroscience
description: What is the relationship between development of the nervous system and the emergence of voluntary motor behavior? This is the central question of the nature-nurture discussion that has intrigued child psychologists and pediatric neurologists for decades. This paper attempts to revisit this issue. Recent empirical evidence on how infants acquire multi-joint coordination and how children learn to adapt to novel force environments will be discussed with reference to the underlying development of the nervous system. The claim will be made that the developing human nervous system by no means constitutes an ideal controller. However, its redundancy, its ability to integrate multi-modal sensory information and motor commands and its facility of time-critical neural plasticity are features that may prove to be useful for the design of adaptive robots.
publisher: Lund University Cognitive Studies
contributor: Berthouze, Luc
contributor: Kozima, Hideki
contributor: Prince, Christopher G.
contributor: Sandini, Giulio
contributor: Stojanov, Georgi
contributor: Metta, Giorgio
contributor: Balkenius, Christian
date: 2004
type: Conference Paper
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: http://cogprints.org/4068/1/konczak.pdf
identifier:   Konczak, Jürgen  (2004) Neural development and sensorimotor control.  [Conference Paper]     
relation: http://cogprints.org/4068/