New preprint! @martinezlopezp.bsky.social in this systematic review takes a look at the validity & reliability of current tools used for studying habits in the human lab. There are a lot of them! But studies about construct validity were sparse, while reliability analyses were almost nonexistent...

Pablo Martínez-López@martinezlopezp.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Habit research has accumulated many tasks that supposedly tap into the same construct, yet their psychometric properties are rarely examined. Here, we assess their construct validity evidence and analyze their reliability to facilitate interpretation of previous studies and guide novel research ⬇️📝

While preparing your #NCMKobe26 abstract, read through the highlights from #NCMPan25! The meeting highlight article is now available for review. Thank you to some of the scholarship winners from 2025 for putting the article together. journals.physiology....

Faculty at Predominantly Undergraduate Institutions: Your research matters and we want to see you at #NCMKobe26! NCM offers a fellowship to support PUI faculty presenting at the meeting. Up to $1,500 in travel support. More info: ncm-society.org/dive...

Come share your passion about motor control, sensory systems, neurophysiology, neurotechnology, and more at #NCMKobe26 !!

Society for the Neural Control of Movement@ncmsociety.bsky.social · 9mo ago

NCM is proud of the Meeting support program offered again for #NCMKobe26. Learn more if you're a student, early-career scientist, or faculty who’s been underrepresented in the field. Support is available for meeting travel + participation. Details: ncm-society.org/dive...

Deadline to submit for oral presentations at #NCMKobe26 is in just under a month! We especially welcome Team/Panel proposals: 2 hour session w 4 talks + discussion. Historically, the acceptance rate is higher for panels than for individual talks. Poster submission closes in February.

Society for the Neural Control of Movement@ncmsociety.bsky.social · 9mo ago

Don't forget to get your submission in for #NCMKobe26! Team/panel and individual orals close at 23:59 PDT Dec 1. Learn more - ncm-society.org/subm...

Our 2024 paper showed that policy gradient RL (with performance-based memory updates) predicts long-horizon motor learning. Now, @adrianhaith.bsky.social shows that policy-gradient RL also explains learning in other shorter horizon tasks. Exciting! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Policy-Gradient Reinforcement Learning as a General Theory of Practice-Based Motor Skill Learning

Mastering any new skill requires extensive practice, but the computational principles underlying this learning are not clearly understood. Existing theories of motor learning can explain short-term ad...

biorxiv.org

New Pre-Print: www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/... We’re all familiar with having to practice a new skill to get better at it, but what really happens during practice? The answer, I propose, is reinforcement learning - specifically policy-gradient reinforcement learning. Overview 🧵 below...

Policy-Gradient Reinforcement Learning as a General Theory of Practice-Based Motor Skill Learning

Mastering any new skill requires extensive practice, but the computational principles underlying this learning are not clearly understood. Existing theories of motor learning can explain short-term ad...

biorxiv.org

New pre-print! We attempt to survey the two different universes of motor learning research: basic (meetings like NCM, MLMC) and applied (e.g. NASPSA), and consider what these fields can learn from each other and what the future might look like if they can be better integrated. More in Eric's 🧵 👇

Eric Grießbach@ericgriessbach.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Excited to share our new preprint on bridging basic & applied approaches in motor learning 🧠 Integration of these currently separate traditions could advance the field by connecting complementary perspectives on how humans learn and optimize movement. 📄 Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Cerebellar circuit computations for predictive motor control — a Review by Katrina P. Nguyen & Abigail L. Person www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience #neuroskyence

Cerebellar circuit computations for predictive motor control - Nature Reviews Neuroscience

The cerebellum helps ensure the speed and accuracy of movements, but its precise contributions to movement control are unclear. Nguyen and Person here evaluate evidence for and against feedforward mot...

nature.com

Very excited to share our new paper with @adrianhaith.bsky.social, now published in @nathumbehav.nature.com.

Nature Human Behaviour@nathumbehav.nature.com · last yr.

In this article, @yuedu.bsky.social and @adrianhaith.bsky.social show that behavior can become habitual in two different ways, involving response initiation and response preparation, respectively www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In this article, @jetrach.bsky.social and McDougle show that motor responses can form part of structured, graph-like memory representations. @actlab.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations - Nature Human Behaviour

Trach and McDougle show that motor responses can form part of structured, graph-like memory representations.

nature.com

In this article, @yuedu.bsky.social and @adrianhaith.bsky.social show that behavior can become habitual in two different ways, involving response initiation and response preparation, respectively www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dissociable habits of response preparation versus response initiation - Nature Human Behaviour

Du and Haith show that behaviour can become habitual in two different ways, involving response initiation and response preparation.

nature.com

We are recruiting trainees for the Integrative Movement Sciences Summer Institute. Students will gain research experience in dynamic muscular control of movement across organizational scales from molecular mechanisms to whole-body movement in complex environments. Learn more: tinyurl.com/5n7w6pey

Want to hear more about how feedback can guide learning in RNNs for motor adaptation. Here is our new paper in Nat. Com. with Barbara Feulner and @juangallego.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A neural implementation model of feedback-based motor learning - Nature Communications

How the brain adapts our movements to new conditions remains unclear. Here, the authors show that a recurrent neural network that controls its output using error-based feedback can learn to count...

nature.com

🚨New paper alert🚨 Skin stretches when we move, but how complex are these patterns? How may this be encoded? Local postural changes elicit extensive and diverse skin stretch around joints, on the trunk and the face - now in @royalsociety.org Interface

We have a great program lined up for NCM 2025 in Panama! Poster submissions are open until Feb 17th. #NCMPan25

Society for the Neural Control of Movement@ncmsociety.bsky.social · 2y ago

The #NCMPan25 program is now available! Review the talks, panels, and more and make your plans for Panama.

Our Barcelona-based summer school, BAMB! (bambschool.org) just opened applications! Come join us: 15-24th July, to learn how to model behavioral data using RL, Bayesian, latent variable models, RNNs, DDMs & more! #BAMB2025

BAMB!

Course philosophy Our goal is​ to teach advanced techniques in model-based analysis of behavior (humans and other animals) to cognitive and computational neuroscientists at PhD and early career levels...

bambschool.org

Excited this one is finally out! The forced response method: A new chronometric approach to measure conflict processing with @hanzhang.bsky.social link.springer.com/10.3758/s134... Can we better study how the conflict between goal-directed and habitual/automatic actions is resolved? Read on!

The forced-response method: A new chronometric approach to measure conflict processing - Behavior Research Methods

Despite long-standing concerns about the use of free reaction times (RTs) in cognitive psychology, they remain a prevalent measure of conflict resolution. This report presents the forced-response meth...

link.springer.com

Just under 2 weeks left to submit your panel and individual talk proposals for #NCM2025 in Panama. Dec 2nd deadline. There's still time to put together a panel proposal if you haven't already! Details at ncm-society.org/submission/