Prehension, the act of reaching to grasp an object, is one of our most precious behaviours. It is highly evolved in primates and allows us to manipulate objects, acquire and prepare food for eating, construct and use tools, and communicate through gestures, written words, and creative art. Not surprisingly, it is the behavior that people with sensorimotor disorders most want restored; however, its neural basis is highly complex, involves distributed pathways that traverse most brain regions, and is not well understood. My long-term research goal is to determine how the human brain generates skilled hand and mouth movements. I am especially interested in how these movements and their underlying neural substrates arose through evolution, are established during development, and breakdown in various neurological disorders. I use 3D linear kinematics and high-speed frame-by-frame video analyses to characterize the structure and behavioural organization of skilled hand and mouth movements in healthy human adults, developing human infants, and non-human species in order to derive insight into how the neural substrates that underlie these behaviours are organized.
