Author: A. Berthoz
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195068203
Category: Medical
Page: 798
View: 162
This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of the control of vertebrate head movements and its biomechanical and neural basis. It covers the entire spectrum of research on head-neck movements, ranging from the global description and analysis of a particular behavior to its underlying mechanisms at the level of neurotransmitter release and membrane biophysics.
Author: Alvin J. Beitz
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 0849376793
Category: Science
Page: 568
View: 732
The ability to quantify the sensory stimuli and resulting behavioral responses has enabled researchers over the past thirty years to gain an in-depth understanding of the physiological processes and neural pathways involved in the control of eye and head movements and posture. However, the molecular mechanisms and neurochemical processes that underlie neurotransmission of the vestibular and oculomotor pathways have begun to be defined only during the past decade. The first book available on this topic, Neurochemistry of the Vestibular System covers the proliferation of new information stemming from the technical advances in the areas of molecular biology and neurochemistry. It analyzes the recent developments in areas that relate to the neurochemical organization of the hair cells in the inner ear, the vestibular nerve, the vestibular nuclear complex, and central afferent and efferent vestibular projections. The book also identifies future directions for research in the areas of neurotransmitters, second messengers, transcription factors, and molecular mechanisms involved with both normal vestibular function and compensation. Features
Author: Jack M. Winters
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781461390305
Category: Science
Page: 801
View: 202
The picture on the front cover of this book depicts a young man pulling a fishnet, a task of practical relevance for many centuries. It is a complex task, involving load transmission throughout the body, intricate balance, and eye head-hand coordination. The quest toward understanding how we perform such tasks with skill and grace, often in the presence of unpredictable pertur bations, has a long history. However, despite a history of magnificent sculptures and drawings of the human body which vividly depict muscle ac tivity and interaction, until more recent times our state of knowledge of human movement was rather primitive. During the past century this has changed; we now have developed a considerable database regarding the com position and basic properties of muscle and nerve tissue and the basic causal relations between neural function and biomechanical movement. Over the last few decades we have also seen an increased appreciation of the impor tance of musculoskeletal biomechanics: the neuromotor system must control movement within a world governed by mechanical laws. We have now col lected quantitative data for a wealth of human movements. Our capacity to understand the data we collect has been enhanced by our continually evolving modeling capabilities and by the availability of computational power. What have we learned? This book is designed to help synthesize our current knowledge regarding the role of muscles in human movement. The study of human movement is not a mature discipline.
Author: Per Brodal
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 9780195381153
Category: Medical
Page: 606
View: 112
A textbook of neuroscience for undergraduate medical students providing a concise yet critical treatment of structure - function relationships as a basis for clinical thinking. It aims at conveying an understanding of how the nervous system performs it tasks by using data from molecular biology to clinical neurology.
Author: Simon Liversedge
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780191626616
Category: Psychology
Page: 1048
View: 706
In the past few years, there has been an explosion of eye movement research in cognitive science and neuroscience. This has been due to the availability of 'off the shelf' eye trackers, along with software to allow the easy acquisition and analysis of eye movement data. Accompanying this has been a realisation that eye movement data can be informative about many different aspects of perceptual and cognitive processing. Eye movements have been used to examine the visual and cognitive processes underpinning a much broader range of human activities, including, language production, dialogue, human computer interaction, driving behaviour, sporting performance, and emotional states. Finally, in the past thirty years, there have been real advances in our understanding of the neural processes that underpin eye movement behaviour. The Oxford Handbook of Eye Movements provides the first comprehensive review of the entire field of eye movement research. In over fifty chapters, it reviews the developments that have so far taken place, the areas actively being researched, and looks at how the field is likely to devlop in the coming years. The first section considers historical and background material, before moving onto section 2 on the neural basis of eye movements. The third and fourth sections looks at visual cognition and eye movements and eye movement pathology and development. The final sections consider eye movements and reading and language processing and eye movements. Bringing together cutting edge research from and international team of leading psychologists, neuroscientists, and vision researchers, this book is the definitive reference work in this field.
Author: F. Hlavacka
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781461519317
Category: Medical
Page: 358
View: 620
From recent developments in the rapidly growing area of neuroscience it has become increasingly clear that a simplistic description of brain function as a broad collection of simple input-output relations is quite inadequate. Introspection already tells us that our motor behavior is guided by a complex interplay between many inputs from the outside world and from our internal "milieu," internal models of ourselves and the outside world, memory content, directed attention, volition, and so forth. Also, our motor activity normally involves more than a circumscribed group of muscles, even if we intend to move only one effector organ. For example, a reaching movement or a reorientation of a sensory organ almost invariably requires a pattern of preparatory or assisting activities in other parts of the body, like the ones that maintain the body's equilibrium. The present volume is a summary of the papers presented at the symposium "Sensory Interaction in Posture and Movement Control" that was held at Smolenice Castle near Bratislava, Slovakia, as a Satellite Symposium to the ENA Meeting 1994 in Vienna. The focus of this meeting was not only restricted to the "classical" sensory interactions such as between vestibular and visual signals, or between otolith and semicircular canal inputs. Rather, the symposium tried to consider also the interplay between perception and action, between reflexive and volitional motor acts as well as between sensory driven or self-initi ated motor acts and reafferent inputs.
Author: Mark L. Latash
Publisher: Human Kinetics
ISBN: 0736000275
Category: Human locomotion
Page: 280
View: 531
Progress in Motor Control, Volume Two, features 12 chapters by internationally known researchers in the field of motor control. Comprehensive and up to date, the reference reflects the spirit of the great Nikolai Bernstein, one of the founders of the area now defined as motor control and a significant contributor to the structure-function controversy. Progress in Motor Control, Volume Two, preserves many of the features that made the first volume a state-of-the-art reference and presents these new features: -A reader-friendly design -More than 170 figures to illustrate the scientific ideas expressed -Many up-to-date references to help readers find the most current research in the field Less theoretical than the first volume, this book provides readers with valuable information on these subjects: -The direct relations of the motor function to neurophysiological and/or biomechanical structures -The role of the motor cortex and other brain structures in motor control and motor learning -The multidimensional and temporal regulation of limb mechanics by spinal circuits In this unique forum, prominent motor control scientists contribute varying viewpoints on different aspects of structure-function relations. These prominent scholars include scientists from the former Soviet Union who either knew Bernstein personally or worked closely with his students, biomechanists and neurophysiologists who focus on the role of particular body structures in the movement of production, and clinicians who analyze changes in movements with children and adults with neurological disorders. The book also gives an overview of the disagreement between Ivan Pavlov and Nikolai Bernstein, which is one of the most fascinating and controversial disagreements in the history of contemporary neurophysiology. Whether you're a researcher, or graduate or postdoctoral student, Progress in Motor Control, Volume Two, thoroughly summarizes the latest motor control issues, research, and theories, and it identifies problems in need of investigation.
Author: Donald R. Murphy
Publisher: McGraw-Hill/Appleton & Lange
ISBN: UOM:39015042088875
Category: Cervical vertebrae
Page: 776
View: 699
Providing a comprehensive reference of cervical spine function, dysfunction, clinical syndromes, evaluation and management, this work offers guidelines on how to approach specific clinical syndromes related to the cervical spine from the standpoint of signs and syndromes, differential diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, referral, and home care.
Author: Stephen Huston
Publisher:
ISBN: OCLC:1063525944
Category:
Page:
View: 798
How the outputs of populations of sensory neurons are used by motor systems to generate appropriate behaviour is a long standing question in neuroscience. I address this problem by studying a comparatively simple model system. In the fly, Neck Motor Neurons control gaze-stabilising head movements that occur during whole body rotations. These motor neurons receive several sensory inputs including one from well-characterized visual interneurons, Tangential Cells (TCs), which respond to panoramic image shifts induced during self-motion. In chapter one, I provide a general introduction to sensory-motor circuits and the flygaze-stabilisation system. In chapter two, I report that the visual receptive fields of Neck Motor Neurons are similar to those of the TCs. Using this result, I show an alignment between the coordinate systems used by the visual and the neck motor systems to process visual information. Thus, TCs encode visual inputs in a manner already closely matched to the requirements of the neck motor neurons, considerably facilitating the visual-motor transformation. In chapter three, I analyse the gating of neck motor neuron visual responses by convergent mechanosensory inputs from the halteres. Some neck motor neurons do not fire action potentials in response to visual stimuli alone, but they will in response to haltere movements. I show that visual stimuli produce sustained sub-threshold depolarisations in these neurons. These visual depolarisations increase the proportion of haltere-induced action potentials in neck motor neurons. Thus, visual inputs can only affect the spiking output if the halteres are moving. This simple mechanism could explain why flies only make visually induced head movements during walking or flight: behaviours that involve beating the halteres. By analysing how the outputs of a model sensory system are used, I have shown a novel alignment between sensory and motor neuron populations and a simple mechanism underlying multisensory fusion.
Author: Jon H. Kaas
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0123751683
Category: Science
Page: 1038
View: 613
Evolutionary Neuroscience is a collection of articles in brain evolution selected from the recent comprehensive reference, Evolution of Nervous Systems (Elsevier, Academic Press, 2007). The selected chapters cover a broad range of topics from historical theory to the most recent deductions from comparative studies of brains. The articles are organized in sections focused on theories and brain scaling, the evolution of brains from early vertebrates to present-day fishes, amphibians, reptiles and birds, the evolution of mammalian brains, and the evolution of primate brains, including human brains. Each chapter is written by a leader or leaders in the field, and has been reviewed by other experts. Specific topics include brain character reconstruction, principles of brain scaling, basic features of vertebrate brains, the evolution of the major sensory systems, and other parts of brains, what we can learn from fossils, the origin of neocortex, and the evolution of specializations of human brains. The collection of articles will be interesting to anyone who is curious about how brains evolved from the simpler nervous systems of the first vertebrates into the many different complex forms now found in present-day vertebrates. This book would be of use to students at the graduate or undergraduate levels, as well as professional neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and psychologists. Together, the chapters provide a comprehensive list of further reading and references for those who want to inquire further. • The most comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date single volume collection on brain evolution • Full color throughout, with many illustrations • Written by leading scholars and experts
