Konczak publishes with Italian partners in Behavioural Brain Research

Dr. Jürgen Konczak
Dr. Anna Vera Cuppone

Jürgen Konczak, Ph.D., professor in the School of Kinesiology and director of the Human Sensorimotor Control Laboratory (HSCL), has published a paper with colleagues in Behavioural Brain Research. “Consolidation of human somatosensory memory during motor learning” is a collaboration with colleagues from the Italian Institute of Technology. Dr. Anna Vera Cuppone, first author, spent 9 months in HSCL as a visiting scholar, and the data were collected both at HSCL and in Italy.

The main idea behind the paper is to understand how memory is formed during motor learning. Researchers looked at a form of memory related to body awareness, i.e., “how it feels” when the body performs the newly acquired movement patterns. Research in the last years has recognized that such somatosensory and motor learning go hand-in-hand to form “motor memory.” Researchers show how training body awareness improves skill level. The impact of this work relates to neurorehabilitation, because people with stroke that affects the somatosensory cortex, i.e., the part of the brain involved with somatosensory learning, are the most difficult patients to recover. Sensory-based motor learning may help them to recover faster and more completely.