Event:

The ability to acquire a countless number of skilled action sequences and retrieve them from memory precisely in the right context is crucial in daily life, such as for speech, tool use, athletic and musical performance. In the first part of my talk, I will present our latest results which provide a fundamental insight into the neural preparation of sequences from memory in humans and may serve a non-invasive neural marker for skilled sequence control.
In the second part, I will outline a new theoretical framework of a condition that affects highly skilled action sequences selectively – task-specific dystonia (e.g. writer’s cramp, musician’s dystonia) – with no treatment being predictively effective. The framework considers task-specific dystonia in the context of motor skill representations in health, with the important implication for prevention and retraining.