Room 113, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
Millions of people tune in to watch the IPL, and athletes command salaries worth crores. Clearly, we, as a society, are infatuated with people who learn to make highly skilled actions. Yet, we marginalise movement; we have long believed that the learning of skilled actions is unconscious and automatic, free of cognitive influences and utilisation of knowledge. Taking the example of motor adaptation, a form of motor learning driven by errors in our actions, I will highlight that contrary to this classic notion, high-level cognition strongly influences the learning of skills. I will also show recent work from our lab that has revealed that these two mechanisms of learning are sensitive to distinct error signals that can arise when we move.
Pratik Mutha is a faculty member at the Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar. He completed his undergraduate degree from the College of Engineering, Pune, India and PhD from the Pennsylvania State University, United States. After a postdoctoral stint at the New Mexico Veterans Affairs Healthcare System working with patients with brain damage, he returned to India to start his own lab at IIT Gandhinagar in late 2013. His research interests are in understanding how the brain controls movement, and how this control breaks down following neurological injury and disease.
