Department Seminar of Jason friedman -The role of submovements in planning and executing human movement
The role of submovements in planning and executing human movement
Monday March 31th 2025 at 14:00
Wolfson Building of Mechanical Engineering, Room 206
Abstract:
There is a model of human movement that claims that movements are planned based on intermittent control – rather than planning our movements on a moment-by-moment basis, we instead control our movement trajectories at discrete points in time. Such a scheme is likely used to ensure the stability of our movements given the inherent large delays in receiving sensory feedback. Intermittent control can be realized using submovements – short-duration movements (in the order of 2-4Hz) that can overlap in their execution. Given a movement trajectory, we can decompose it into its constituent, overlapping submovements. In the talk, I will give examples of how extracting submovements can be used to help our understanding of how movement differs in certain populations (such as children, older adults, and people with Parkinson’s disease), how movements and decision-making processes are related, and the relationship between movements and cognitive load. In addition, I will describe the effect of movement speed on submovement execution, and our recommendations for how submovements should be used for optimally performing human-robotic interactions.
Bio:
Jason Friedman is an Associate Professor in the Physical Therapy Department at Tel Aviv University. He completed his PhD in Computer Science & Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, followed by postdoctoral positions in kinesiology at Penn State University and in cognitive science at Macquarie University in Australia. His research focuses on human motor control – how we produce and learn to make movements, in healthy participants and people with motor disorders. He uses his computational background to model how movements are generated, focusing on how complex movements can be constructed from motor primitives.
