Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

10-14-2009

Abstract

Although it is widely recognized that adaptive behavior emerges from the ongoing interactions among the nervous system, the body, and the environment, it has only become possible in recent years to experimentally study and to simulate these interacting systems. We briefly review work on molluscan feeding, maintenance of postural control in cats and humans, simulations of locomotion in lamprey, insect, cat and salamander, and active vibrissal sensing in rats to illustrate the insights that can be derived from studies of neural control and sensing within a biomechanical context. These studies illustrate that control may be shared between the nervous system and the periphery, that neural activity organizes degrees of freedom into biomechanically meaningful subsets, that mechanics alone may play crucial roles in enforcing gait patterns, and that mechanics of sensors is crucial for their function.

Language

English

Publication Title

Journal of Neuroscience

Grant

R01NS053822

Rights

© 2013 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-SA license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/), which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and any derivative works are distributed under the same license as the original.

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