Neural circuits of motor performance and skill learning.
Dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease.
Neuromodulation.
Deep brain stimulation.
Tie a shoe. Type a word. Pick up a cup of coffee and sip from it. Performing motor skills like these can feel dead-simple for most of us. But try to train a robot to perform one of these, or ask such a skill from a person suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and one quickly learns that the intuition that motor skills are easy to execute is deeply deceptive.
The Turner lab combines neurophysiologic and pharmacologic methods to dissect:
- the normal functions of cortical and sub-cortical brain circuits that work together to enable the learning and production of motor skill.
- how dysfunctions within these brain circuits give rise to debilitating disorders of movement such as Parkinson’s disease, dystonia and essential tremor.
Representative Publications
Subthalamic nucleus activity influences sensory and motor cortex during force transduction.
Alhourani A, Korzeniewska A, Wozny TA, Lipski WJ, Kondylis ED, Ghuman AS, Crone NE, Crammond DJ, Turner RS, Richardson RM
Cerebral Cortex (2020)
A selective role for ventromedial subthalamic nucleus in inhibitory control.
Pasquereau B, Turner RS
eLife (2017)
Chunking as the result of an efficiency–computation tradeoff.
Ramkumar P, Acuna DE, Berniker M, Grafton ST, Turner RS, Kording KP
Nature Communications (2016)
Primary motor cortex of the parkinsonian monkey: Altered encoding of active movement.
Pasquereau B, DeLong, MR, Turner RS
Brain (2016)
Limited encoding of effort by dopamine neurons in a cost-benefit trade-off task.
Pasquereau B, Turner RS
Journal of Neuroscience (2013)
Basal ganglia contributions to motor control: a vigorous tutor.
Turner RS, Desmurget M.
Current Opinion in Neurobiology (2010)
Motor sequences and the basal ganglia: kinematics, not habits.
Desmurget M, Turner RS
Journal of Neuroscience (2010)
(Highlighted in Faculty of 1000 Neuroscience)