Human & Animal Behaviour

To investigate how the brain controls reaching, we use robotic exoskeletons that let us control every aspect of how the arm moves and what visual information subjects see. With these tools we have shown how what we expect to sense shapes movement planning and feedback control, and we use matched tasks to bridge behavioural findings between humans and non-human primates.

Understanding behaviour also requires stepping outside tightly controlled experiments into naturalistic tasks and environments. We developed ATHENA, a framework for markerless tracking of the arm and hand that needs no manual annotation. These methods are designed to work flexibly and automatically, and in ongoing work we are bringing them to the clinic to quantify behaviour, track change over time, and aid early diagnosis.