Dictionary of Biological Psychology
The research domain concerned with issues related to the selection, sequencing and execution of voluntary movement.
One of the main issues which is central to motor control research (many of which were introduced by the Russian physiologist Bernstein) is the degrees of freedom problem. Since there is no unique solution which provides a desired movement endpoint, the central nervous system has to select a subset of all possible movement components and execute them quickly and in an appropriate order. Other areas of interest include feedback versus feedforward contributions to control, coordinate transformations, and spatial and temporal sequencing of movement subcomponents.
See also: locomotion; motor cortex; motor programming; motor system; movement deficits
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