Speaker: Richard Ivry (UC Berkeley)
Richard Ivry is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute of the University of California, Berkeley.
The Ivry Lab’s research focuses on the cognitive neuroscience of action and skilled movement. They conduct experiments involving neurologically healthy and impaired individuals, using a range of methods to develop psychological models of how people produce and learn movements. They use neuroscientific methods to develop these models and characterize the functional role of different parts of the motor pathways. Current techniques include study of neurological patients including patients with Parkinson’s disease, focal lesions of the basal ganglia and cerebellum, and split-brain patients, functional MRI, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. We also have a virtual reality system to study movements in artificial worlds.
A primary area of study is the relationship of cognition and action. There are many factors that determine why some individuals are coordinated and others are not. Some of these factors may be related to individual differences in biomechanical factors. On the other hand, many relate to differences that arise at more abstract levels of processing associated with action planning. Their work is designed to understand these various factors by studying brain function in healthy individuals and people with damage to different parts of the nervous system.
Another primary area of research involves the study of motor control and motor learning. They have conducted behavioral and neuroimaging studies comparing explicit and implicit motor sequence learning. This work suggests separable psychological and neural systems associated with these two forms of motor learning. Their current work is designed to clarify differences between the systems in terms of how they represent learned associations. They are now extending these ideas to other types of motor learning, focusing on how the principles that operate in learning skilled movements is similar and different to non-motor forms of learning.
Ivry is also interested in how responses are selected. One critical issue here 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. Or, the selection process may be a more distributed process involving local competitions between alternative actions. His lab’s research on this problem involves behavioral and neuroimaging studies with healthy individuals, as well as neuropsychological studies with various groups including split-brain patients. This latter group allows them to observe response selection when the major pathway between the two hemispheres has been severed.
Title
Probing the Role of the Cerebellum in Sensorimotor Learning and Cognition
Abstract
An impressive body of research over the past 35 years has implicated the human cerebellum in a broad range of functions beyond motor control, including language, working memory, cognitive control, and social cognition. The relatively uniform anatomy and physiology of the cerebellar cortex has given rise to the universal cerebellar transform hypothesis (UCT), the idea that the cerebellum can be conceptualized as a module providing a basic computation that is exploited across diverse domains. Proposed UCTs focus on the concepts of prediction and coordination. To make these ideas computationally meaningful, we need to specify the constraints on cerebellar processing: What are the types of prediction supported by the cerebellum and what do we mean when speaking of “mental coordination”? I will address these questions in two parts. First, using variants of sensorimotor adaptation tasks, I will describe properties of a cerebellar-dependent learning process that ensure our movements remain exquisitely calibrated. Second, I will describe how these results have motivated a new hypothesis concerning how the cerebellum might contribute to cognition, focusing on its role in supporting dynamic mental transformations.
Everyone interested is welcome to attend.
The meeting will be held in English.
Participation is strongly recommended for students of the Doctoral School in Philosophy and Human Sciences and for students of the Doctoral School “The Human Mind and its Explanations: Language, Brain, and Reasoning”.
Where: Online
When: 17/12/2025 – 17:00 CET
Attendance: Attendance is free and open to all, but registration is needed by email [angelica.kaufmann@unimi.it]