Center for BioCybernetics and Intelligent Systems

Director: Bijoy K. Ghosh

Home Page: http://www.cbcis.wustl.edu/ Location: 103 Cupples II

Humans are capable of performing impressive variety of movements that range from simple movements, such as looking at an object of interest by turning the head and eyes, to complex and intricate series of movements, such as executing a triple axle on ice. These movements are improved over an extensive period of practice. This process, known as motor learning involves executing movements, identifying errors, and correcting those errors in subsequent movements. The research in this center is driven by the curiosity of understanding and modelling systems that can perform and learn as humans.

News Stories & Tip Sheets:

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Mind over matter Patients play videos with their brains June 9, 2004 -- That's using your brain. For the first time in humans, a team headed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis has placed an electronic grid atop patients' brains to gather motor signals that enable patients to play a computer game using only the signals from their brains.

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Faculty Experts:

The best understood movement system is the eye movements. The Center is interested in modelling and control of the human ocular system. There is a direct link between the role played by visual attention and eye movements. Attention contributes to the control of saccades; specifically, attention is allocated to the chosen target shortly before the saccade is made to look at it.

Going one step further, the center is also interested in the visual processing system. The importance of vision in our daily lives is reflected in the fact that we have large and highly mobile eyes. But our reliance on vision is also evident in the large amount of brain devoted to visual processing. Modelling of the fresh water turtle visual cortex to broaden our understanding is one of the center's major topics of interest. The possible cell types in the visual cortex can be defined in terms of the functional influence of their synapses (excitatory or inhibitory); anatomical features (dendrites, stellate or pyramidal ); intrinsic membrane properties (fast-spiking, regular- spiking, bursting, among others ); or patterns of connectivity. Most notably, inhibitory and excitatory neurons compose two main distinct groups.