Project description
Controllability as a key principle in sensorimotor neuroscience
Controllability, which is defined as our ability to influence our environment, is significant in psychology, psychiatry, and engineering. Current sensorimotor learning frameworks offer limited insights into this process. While optimal feedback control addresses movement execution, many models focus on trial-level metrics. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the ConCon project will investigate controllability in human sensorimotor control to understand how people infer environmental dynamics during movement and learning. It will develop a unified theory and framework that integrate various control models while examining how actions affect the environment across different contexts. The project will establish controllability as a key principle in sensorimotor neuroscience, providing insights into adaptive behaviour and control disorders.
Objective
Controllability, the extent to which we can control our environment, is central across disciplines: in psychology, it relates to affordances, in psychiatry, it has been implicated in learned helplessness and depression; in engineering, it is formalized in control theory. This project examines controllability in human sensorimotor control, which offers highly quantitative opportunities for studying flexible, context-dependent internal representations of controllability in a domain where they have special relevance but have remained largely unexplored.
Existing theoretical frameworks in sensorimotor learning and control only allow partial formalisations of how the mind learns about controllability. Optimal feedback control provides a normative theory of movement execution once stable internal models have been learned. Models of sensorimotor learning explain adaptation across trials but reduce learning to trial-level summary measures, neglecting the online processes that shape behaviour as movements unfold. In this project, I will develop a unified theory that explains how humans continuously infer both environmental dynamics and their controllability on the timescale of single movements as well as across learning, and test the predictions of this theory through the analysis of experimental data sets.
Aim 1 is to develop a normative framework that integrates optimal feedback control, inverse optimal control, and probabilistic models of contextual inference. These methodological advances will enable the development of theoretical models of continuous learning during movement. Aim 2 is to test how humans infer whether and how their actions control environmental dynamics in different contexts. By combining recent methodological and theoretical advances, the project will establish controllability as a core principle in sensorimotor neuroscience, offering new insights into adaptive behaviour and providing a foundation for understanding both typical and disordered control.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences neurobiology
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine psychiatry
- social sciences psychology
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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CB2 1TN CAMBRIDGE
United Kingdom
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