MYODECISION · Neuromuscular-cognitive interactions in sensorimotor decision making

Successfully interacting with one’s environment requires a rich interplay of perceptual judgement and neuromuscular control, with each taking account of the other in real time. Miscalculations in this accounting, as happens in demanding sensorimotor tasks (e.g. sports), cognitive and motor disorders, or with age-related decline, can have serious consequences. Despite the huge growth in modelling and neurophysiological studies of perceptual decision making, the critical role played by neuromuscular processes has been largely neglected due to challenges in parsing distinct effects of sensory, cognitive and motor processing in the brain. Our recently developed computational framework for jointly modelling behaviour with well-characterised neurophysiological signatures of sensorimotor decision formation now provides a means to overcome this parsing problem, offering a window onto the hierarchy of cortical processing involved. MYODECISION will capitalise on this advance to develop new decision paradigms that interface directly with muscle outputs, making the participants active agents in meeting changing neuromuscular demands, and hence resolve major outstanding questions regarding how sensory and motor systems interact in the brain. First, I will investigate how people adjust sensorimotor processes to meet changing time and effort demands on their motor outputs, including fine-grained manipulations of muscle-activation strength requirements, speed pressure, and effort biases. Then, using open- and closed-loop stimulus perturbations I will probe how these processes underpin dynamic changes of mind that rescue erroneous behaviours. Finally, I will develop a robust approach to neurally-constrained modelling aimed at examining individual differences in decision making in challenging sensorimotor environments. This work will offer the field a transformative paradigm for probing latent psychological processes in more ecologically representative decision scenarios.