Referent control of action and perception

Dr. Anatol Feldman is one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists in the area of motor control. His work has had a strong and sustained influence in behavioral neuroscience since the 1960’s when he published a unique theory of motor control, called the equilibrium-point hypothesis He has been a professor in the Department of Physiology (now Neuroscience) at the University of Montreal since 1990. After having been denied the right to travel out of the USSR for 25 years, he was granted permission to attend a neuroscience meeting as a distinguished Keynote Speaker in Ontario in 1988. He returned to Canada as a visiting professor at McGill University in 1989. In 1997, he joined the Centre de recherche en sciences neurologiques (CRSN) in the Department of Neuroscience at the Université de Montréal. His laboratories are affiliated with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Rehabilitation of Greater Montreal (CRIR). He is the first recipient of the Nicolai Bernstein award from the International Society of Motor Control.

Preamble: The meaning of the term referent control.- Running away from KGP informers to neuroscience.- Action and perception in the context of physical laws.- Referent control as a specific form of parametric control of actions: Empirical demonstrations.- Physiological origin and feed-forward nature of referent control.- Different forms of referent control.- Solutions to classical problems in the control of motor actions.- Redundancy problems.- Action-perception coupling.- Afterword: Major lessons and perspectives.