The influence of uncertainty on motor learning and its neural representation

This is my blog post on a talk by Konrad Kording about how uncertainty affect affects our motor learning. He said that to predict an uncertain event, like where a tennis ball will land, we use prior knowledge and likelihood. He explained how our bodies use Bayesian statistics to account for uncertainty. To prove this, he set up an experiment where people would be misled about the location of their hand under an enclosure. He would see how the movement of the hand would change based on this. He said that it would change, as long as the people believed that the feedback they were receiving was real. If the feedback was radically off, they would be able to tell and ignore it. I found this very interesting, even if it is pretty obvious. The whole talk seemed to explain some of our actions in an easy to comprehend fashion. Basically our body has an automatic way to calculate and correct for uncertainty using Bayesian methods. If you want to learn more about his research you can visit www.koerding.com