Professor Lee wins the Parkinson’s Foundation Young Investigator Award!
This award will fund a three year project examining the role of cognitive control networks in the motor deficits of persons with Parkinson’s Disease.
First lab paper in print!
Way to go Sean Anderson!
Rewards interact with explicit knowledge to enhanced skilled motor performance. Now out in J Neurophys!
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jn.00575.2019
New lab preprint! Rewards interact with explicit knowledge to enhance skilled motor performance
Rewards interact with explicit knowledge to enhance skilled motor performance
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/745851v1
Excited to share the lab’s 2nd official preprint and our 1st with a pre-registered experiment! Props to 1st author (and CoCoA lab RA) Sean Anderson! There is a lot of evidence that rewards causes people to ‘do better’. Rewards increase vigor (force/speed) of simple movements.
We were curious if the reward-based improvements seen in more complex motor skills were all just due to this increase in motivational vigor, or if other processes in the hierarchy of action (planning and/or action selection) were similarly improved.
Participants trained on motor sequencing skills, some with color cues to promote explicit knowledge and allow for movement pre-planning. Although rewards improved performance on all skills, those that could be pre-planned showed a much larger boost in performance.
The size of this boost was related to the amount of explicit knowledge gained, but only if pre-planning was possible. It seems that movement pre-planning is enhanced by reward and that explicit skill knowledge benefits are due to planning despite what is sometimes claimed.
The lab is growing! Welcome James and Quynh!
We’re excited to announce that we’ll have two new members of the lab this fall! James Brissenden will be joining as a postdoctoral fellow and Quynh Nguyen will be starting as a first year PhD student in Psychology. Learn more about them here: Lab Members