The overall goal of the project has been to provide a theoretical context encompassing motivation, motor control theory and decision-making. There are two major issues being addressed in this project; the first is concerned to how the brain relates incentive motivation to behaviour and whether decision-making abides by the same principles of motor control. The second regards the abnormalities of these motor control principles under Parkinson's disease.
The main societal relevance of the project is enabling a wholistic characterization of motivation-related mental states through movement related characterizations, by integrating physiological metrics of motivation into movement related theory. This would operate by first establishing a relationship between non-observable motivation-related physiological processes, to observable and quantifiable metrics of movement, such as velocity, acceleration or shape of movement itself, in a principled fashion. Furthermore, this would indirectly, but importantly, provide a method for the characterization of Parkinson's disease and other motivation related disorders in a principled fashion.
The overal objectives are: first, the development of a novel unifying method of neural dynamics, called Quantitative Motor Control for Decision-Making (QTMODEM), aimed at characterizing the process of selection of motor parameters as a function of external stimuli, and most importantly, of incentive motivation for different kinds of movements. Furthermore, we intend to refer the selection of motor parameters to a novel metric of motivation, derived from a characterization of mental states based on electro-encephalographic signals in the context of a controlled experimental setup. Second, as a necessary means to the previous objective, it was necessary to propose and carry out two series of experiments to record both kinematics and electro-encephalography from healthy subjects while varying two factors in a controlled fashion: the nature of their movement and the subjects’ level of incentive motivation.
