Research

I study motor skill acquisition. Or how to learn to move with a level of expertise, like playing my favorite sport .

The most beautiful thing to me is the reciprocal relationship between the brain and the body: the brain “controls” the body, and movements of the body also alter the brain. The real reason for brain is to control movement/motor behavior. This Ted Talk by Daniel Wolpert and this article by John Krakauer et al. articulate this view very eloquently.

Our ability to learn motor skills is related to visuospatial ability, the cognitive ability to perceive the spatial relations to objects we interact with through vision . My overall research question is: “can changes in visuospatial ability affect motor skill acquisition?”

I use neuromodulation to tackle this question. Neuromodulation, by its name, is to modulate neural activity purposefully. Can we enhance visuospatial function through neuromodulation, and thereby enhance motor skill learning? Answering these questions can reveal an opportunity to improve motor learning, which ultimately leads to better performance.

Below are my recent projects for this research. I am working on developing the contents, but all the titles are out there so that you can get a of what I am doing.