Skilled Action & Memory Lab

Picture (top): Philip Patenall for the online cover of Nature Reviews Neurology highlighting our paper http://rdcu.be/F2RB

Every day, our brains coordinate an incredible range of skilled actions — from tool-use, speaking and typing to playing music or mastering a sport. Each of these abilities depends on the brain’s remarkable capacity to encode, retrieve, and control complex action sequences.

At the Skilled Action & Memory Lab, we ask: How does the brain make skilled performance possible? And what happens when these processes break down — as in developmental coordination disorder (DCD/dyspraxia), stroke, or Parkinson’s disease?

Our mission is to understand the neural and informational foundations of skilled movement and timing, and to translate this knowledge into new ways to support learning, recovery, and performance. We aim to create pathways toward effective interventions, brain–computer interfaces, and rehabilitation technologies that enhance both health and human potential.

To reach these goals, we combine sequence learning paradigms with cutting-edge measures of brain, muscle, and behavior — including fMRI, MEG/EEG, EMG, motion dynamics, kinematics, and motor timing. We use computational and informational analyses to decode the structure of skilled behavior.

Collaboration is at our core: we work with partners in computer science, neurology, movement rehabilitation, and animal neurophysiology to bridge fundamental neuroscience and real-world applications