BMI Seminar // Jean Michel Mongeau: How brains and bodies build flexible movement

Movement depends on nested sensorimotor loops that span multiple levels of control, from rapid stabilizing reflexes to goal-directed actions. A central challenge in motor neuroscience is to understand how these levels interact to produce flexible behavior, and where adaptation and sensory feedback are distributed across the hierarchy. In this talk, I will present a framework for studying motor control that combines experiments and theory at the interface of neuromechanics, control theory, and robotics. Using insect locomotion as an experimentally tractable model, I will show how vision and proprioception contribute to control at different levels of the motor hierarchy. I will also discuss new experimental and computational approaches for probing closed-loop motor control in virtual reality. More broadly, this work aims to uncover general principles by which nervous systems generate flexible movement through interactions among neural circuits, body mechanics, and the environment.