"4068","Neural development and sensorimotor control","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.","http://cogprints.org/4068/","Konczak, Jürgen","Berthouze, Luc and Kozima, Hideki and Prince, Christopher G. and Sandini, Giulio and Stojanov, Georgi and Metta, Giorgio and Balkenius, Christian"," Konczak, Jürgen (2004) Neural development and sensorimotor control. [Conference Paper] ","","2004"