Online Lecture #5

🎙️ Speaker: Prof. Dr. Stephan Swinnen, Emeritus Professor KU Leuven
📅 Date: Thursday, 5th February  2026
⏰ Time: 12:00-14:00 CET

🖥️ Link to join: Zoom

Topic: Aging and the Brain: Processes of Neural Dedifferentiation and Compensation

Aging is associated with alterations in functional brain activation and changes in structural and functional brain connectivity as well as neurochemicals. These changes have consequences for motor behavior. I will first address agerelated differences in upper-limb motor behavior across the lifespan. Then, I will discuss aging from the perspective of the compensation versus dedifferentiation hypothesis. On the one hand, this refers to support for compensatory brain activation in relation to performance and learning of complex motor skills, suggesting retained training-induced neuroplasticity in older adults. I will also provide evidence for associations between the degree of integrity of grey and white matter structures and motor behavior in older adults. On the other hand, I will demonstrate how resting-state brain functional connectivity may point to processes of dedifferentiation in older adults and this may have consequences for motor behavior. More specifically, reduced network segregation (increased inter-network connectivity) in the older brain is associated with decreased levels of motor performance.

In summary, a case is made for a multimodal imaging approach to investigate age-related differences in brain and motor behavior and their interaction. I will conclude with some perspectives on how age-related processes of degeneration in the brain can be alleviated or counteracted to promote functional independence and a healthy life.

Online Lecture #4

🎙️ Speaker: Prof. Dr. Andrew Gordon, Columbia University
📅 Date: Thursday, 20th November 2025
⏰ Time: 16:00-18:00 CET

Topic: Translating Neuromotor Research into Pediatric Rehabilitation

Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most common pediatric physical and neurological disorder. It refers to a group of permanent disorders affecting the development of movement and posture, resulting in activity and participation limitations. Historically, treatment approaches focused primarily on remediating impairments with little expectation for improvement in motor function. However, our early research on prehension demonstrated that upper extremity function can indeed improve with significantly more intensive practice than what is required for typically developing children. This discovery laid the groundwork for intensive, motor learning–based interventions.

Our lab, along with others, has demonstrated the efficacy of several intensive treatment approaches. These interventions emphasize active movement and aim to enhance functional outcomes rather than simply normalize movement patterns. In this presentation, we summarize the current state of the science behind effective rehabilitation strategies, as well as neural predictors of treatment response and the role of neuroplasticity in driving motor improvements.

Despite their proven efficacy, intensive therapies require high treatment dosages that are often challenging to implement in clinical settings. These therapies are time-consuming, and demand significant resources in terms of personnel, training, and service delivery restructuring. Consequently, they are often expensive and not fully covered by health systems. As a result, access to high-dose therapies remains limited.

In this context, we synthesize current evidence for adjunctive strategies aimed at enhancing motor outcomes in children with CP. These include home- and school-based training, alternative dosing models, recreational physical activities, and non-invasive brain stimulation techniques to facilitate motor learning.

Online Lecture #3

🎙️ Speaker: Prof. Dr. Mark Latash, Pennsylvania State University
📅 Date: Thursday, 21st August 2025
⏰ Time: 12:00-14:00 CET

 Topic: Structure of Motor variability as a Window into the Neural Control of Action

Biological movements involve numerous elements (joints, digits, muscles, neurons, etc.) at any level of analysis. This feature, addressed as motor redundancy, has been traditionally viewed as a source of computational problems for the brain. An alternative view, the principle of abundance, views the excess of elements as a powerful design that allows the brain to ensure and modify in a task-specific way dynamical stability of salient performance variables. The concept of uncontrolled manifold (UCM) as the solution space for a performance variable in a higher-dimensional space of elemental variables has been developed into a toolbox that allows to quantify features of action stability across tasks, spaces of analysis, and populations (including neurological patients). Its application has led to hypotheses on parallel action- stabilizing loops involving different neural circuitry. Recent developments include the analysis of intra-muscle performance- stabilizing synergies in spaces of individual motor unit firing frequencies, likely based on spinal circuitry, the analysis of synergies in spaces of hypothetical control variables (the reciprocal and coactivation commands) defined at different levels of the hierarchy, and exploration of the properties of the UCM.

Online Lecture #2

🎙️ Speaker: Prof. Dr. Paul Cisek, University of Montreal
📅 Date: Thursday, 3 April 2025
⏰ Time: 12:00-14:00 CET

 Topic: Neural mechanisms of embodied decisions Abstract

Psychological and neurophysiological studies of decision-making have focused primarily on scenarios in which subjects are faced with abstract choices that are stable in time. This has led to serial models of decision-making which begin with the representation of relevant information about costs and benefits, followed by careful deliberation about the choice leading to commitment. These cognitive models are separate from models of motor planning and execution, which normally begin with a single target or goal. However, the brain evolved to interact with a dynamic and constantly changing world, in which the choices themselves as well as their relative costs and benefits are defined by the momentary geometry of the immediate environment and are continuously changing, even during ongoing activity. To deal with the demands of real-time interactive behavior, animals require a neural architecture in which the sensorimotor specification of potential actions, their valuation, selection, and even execution can all take place in parallel. I will describe a general hypothesis for how the brain deals with the challenges of such dynamic and embodied behavior, and present the results of behavioral and neurophysiological experiments in which humans and monkeys make decisions on the basis of sensory information that changes over time. These experiments suggest that sensory information pertinent to decisions is processed quickly and combined with a growing signal related to the urge to act, and the result biases a competition between potential actions that unfolds within the same sensorimotor circuits that guide action. Finally, I will discuss how the processes of deliberation, commitment, and movement execution can be considered as states of an integrated dynamical system distributed across cortical and subcortical circuits.

Online Lecture #1

🎙️ Speaker: Prof. Dr. Hermann Müller, Justus Liebig University Gießen
📅 Date: Thursday, 23 January 2025
⏰ Time: 12:00-14:00 CET

Topic: Analyzing Functional Variability – Decomposition and Quantification

Variability is ubiquitous in human movement control, compromising reliable achievement of action goals. Stochastic fluctuations, so-called noise, exist in the environment, in sensory input, in signal transduction, and/or in the functional state of the effectors. Yet, the control system exploits multiple strategies to reduce the negative consequences of such noise. These strategies not only imply pure reduction of noise but can also involve specific adjustments to the task requirements. The variability in different parts of the movements may be shaped in a way that deviations in one part may compensate for deviations in other parts. Such variability can be considered as being “functional”. It does not endanger movement success but rather contributes to a reliable outcome. Furthermore, in case tasks can be solved in different ways, skilled people typically select solutions that are tolerant to variability in movement execution. Overall, these different strategies may all contribute to reducing the negative effects of noise; however, their specific relevance may differ from case to case. Different methods have been introduced to quantify the contribution of each of these factors on overall performance and performance improvements during learning. These methods will be discussed with regard to their usefulness to describe and explain differences in learning and performance across different populations, also including clinical aspects.

Timetable Future Online Lecture Series

Lecture #06: 7th May 2026

Lecturer: Leslie Decker

Moderator(s): tba

Lecture #07: 6th August 2026

Lecturer: tba

Moderator(s): tba

Lecture #08: 5th November 2026

Lecturer: tba

Moderator(s): tba

Lecture #09: 4th February 2027

Lecturer: tba

Moderator(s): tba

Lecture #10: 13th May 2027

Lecturer: tba

Moderator(s): tba