My research currently focuses on differentiating the kinematic characteristics and neural control of familiar, trained movements vs. unfamiliar, novel movements. Some sort of internal model defines a familiar movement as such; how does the activity within and across different brain regions reflect this model? I have hypothesized that parietal area 5d carries multimodal information about plans for movement sequences, and shares this internal model information with primary motor cortex.

Figure: Target and hand cursor paths during one sample trial. The human participant attempted to keep his or her hand cursor as close as possible to the continuously moving target, which followed a trajectory that included unfamiliar (thin line) and familiar (thick line) movements. Arrow indicates direction of motion.