Each of us possesses an intuitive representation of what it means to drive a car in a busy street of the city centre, to catch a ball in a crowded playground, or simply to get dressed while maintaining proper balance. Although these actions appear effortless, they rely upon a complex chain of operations from sensory through motor signals and this is not yet understood. Moreover, when one or many brain areas involved in these operations are severely perturbed, after a stroke for instance, these complex cognitive operations are disorganized leading to important motor handicaps with a strong impact on the quality of life. Recent technological developments allow investigating human movement control in naturalistic environments using virtual reality displays and robotic devices in both healthy volunteers and patients. These technologies pave the way for a better transfer of knowledge from fundamental to clinical research in order to design more effective and faster rehabilitation protocols.
The PACE (Perception and Action in Complex Environments) research and training programme sits at the interface between basic science, technology and clinics, in order to unveil how humans control and adapt their movements in complex, naturalistic environments. Such a research agenda has major consequences for understanding how these actions are impacted by specific brain insults and how these impairments can be compensated for via new rehabilitation methods. Improving rehabilitation programmes for sensory and motor disabilities across the lifespan is a major societal challenge in Western countries and many obstacles need to be overcome. New technologies, such as robotics or virtual reality, offer exciting opportunities in the perspective to transfer state-of-the-art knowledge from basic research on sensorimotor transformation into the clinical domain. PACE has promoted the transfer of innovative, human-centered technologies between laboratories and clinical units, which is crucial to modernise and rationalise Health Care systems. To meet the societal challenge of European aging societies, it is crucial to train a new generation of researchers in a programme such as PACE where fundamental and applied/clinical research are effectively integrated via collaborative research, doctoral secondments and theoretical courses – in other words, one in which clinicians, neuroscientists, theoreticians and engineers can contribute around a well-defined problem: how humans acquire, lose and recover movement performance.
