Motor function

Motor control is the process by which humans and animals use their brain/cognition to activate and coordinate the muscles and limbs involved in the performance of a motor skill. Fundamentally, it is the integration of sensory information, both about the world and the current state of the body, to determine the appropriate set of muscle forces and joint activations to generate some desired movement or action. This process requires cooperative interaction between the central nervous system and the musculoskeletal system, and is thus a problem of information processing, coordination, mechanics, physics, and cognition. Successful motor control is crucial to interacting with the world, not only determining action capabilities, but regulating balance and stability as well.

The organization and production of movement is a complex problem, so the study of motor control has been approached from a wide range of disciplines, including psychology, cognitive science, biomechanics and neuroscience. While the modern study of motor control is an increasingly interdisciplinary field, research questions have historically been defined as either physiological or psychological, depending on whether the focus is on physical and biological properties, or organizational and structural rules. Areas of study related to motor control are motor coordination, motor learning, signal processing, and perceptual control theory.

The process of becoming aware of a sensory stimuli and using that information to influence an action occurs in stages, and reaction time of simple tasks can be used to reveal information about these stages. Reaction time refers to the period of time between when the stimulus is presented, and the end of the response. Movement time is the time it takes to complete the movement. Some of the first reaction time experiments were carried out by Franciscus Donders, who used the difference in response times to a simple reaction task and a choice reaction task to determine the length of time needed to process the stimuli and choose the correct response. While this approach is ultimately flawed, it gave rise to the idea that reaction time was made up of a stimulus identification, followed by a response selection, and then the correct movement was carried out. Further research has provided evidence that these stages do exist, but that the response selection period of any reaction time increases as the number of available choices grows, a relationship known as Hick's law.

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