DANBURY, CONN. — Dr. Richard Ivry, director of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, will discuss recent advances in scientific understanding of the human brain’s cognitive processes in executing actions and skilled movements in his presentation on Thursday, Oct. 14, at Western Connecticut State University.

Ivry, professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley and a member of the executive committee of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, will deliver the fall 2010 invited lecture in the PsychMatters series sponsored by the WCSU psychology department. His talk on “Cortical Control of Motion” will be at 11 a.m. in the Student Center Theater on the university’s Midtown campus, 181 White St. in Danbury. Admission will be free and the public is invited to attend.

Ivry’s research has focused on determining the functional roles of different areas in the brain’s pathways that control motor processes and how they produce skilled movement, temporal processing and response selection. His UC-Berkeley laboratory team has conducted experiments testing behavior, perception and cognitive function for individuals who are neurologically healthy as well as patients who suffer from Parkinson’s disease, brain lesions, split-brain conditions and other neural impairments.

An important area of study seeks to test Ivry’s hypothesis that the cerebellum plays a central role in regulating time-related aspects of movement, and in accomplishing tasks of visual, auditory and temporal perception that require precise timing.

“This decade has seen a great deal of interest in higher-level functions of the cerebellum, inspired by intriguing findings that this structure is abnormal in autistic individuals,” Ivry noted in his research statement published online. “We are testing in our patient population the idea that this structure is essential for attention shifting, internal speech, or preparation of response alternatives.”

Ivry also has conducted extensive research to explore the neuroscience of how the right and left sides of the brain communicate to coordinate bimanual tasks and learn to control force, spatial trajectory and other elements in the sequence of skilled movement. Comparative studies of healthy subjects and split-brain individuals whose main neural pathway between right and left lobes has been severed offer significant insights on these motor control questions, as well as the process by which the brain decides how to respond to external stimuli.

“One critical issue is whether there is a central control system that evaluates all possible responses and chooses the one that is most appropriate given the current context,” he observed. “Or is the selection process a more distributed process involving local competitions between alternative actions?”

Ivry’s lecture will provide an overview of recent research on neural processes of motion control, including discussion of rehabilitation potential for individuals with motion and movement disorders. The “PsychMatters” series is designed to inform nonspecialist audiences about significant research in the field of psychology. A brief question-and-answer period will follow the lecture.

For more information, contact Professor of Psychology Dr. Norine Jalbert at jalbertn@wcsu.edu or (203) 837-8476. For additional background on an important study by Ivry’s research team published in September in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, see http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2010/09/27_hands.shtml.

 

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