Samuel McDougle

Humans possess an extraordinary capacity for motor skills. Indeed, next to language (which is itself partly a motor skill) and complex social cognition, one of our species’ defining features is our ability to build a large repertoire of precise motor behaviors. While we all accept the folk wisdom of symbolic phrases like “muscle memory,” effective motor skill learning and performance is not just about building habits – it is also cognitively demanding. Expertise in domains such as athletics or music (e.g., Serena Williams, Itzhak Perlman, etc.), as well as the serviceable everyday skills of ordinary people (us), rely on both cognitive processes and lower-level motor systems. At the Action, Computation, and Thinking (ACT) Lab, we work at the intersection of cognition and motor behavior. Our investigations employ a range of methods, from behavioral experiments to computational modeling, neuroimaging, and neuropsychology.