The Modular Organization of Motor Control: What Frogs Can Teach Us About Adaptive Learning

Abstract

Investigations of motor control in the spinaized frog have suggested the presence, within the spinal cord, of a number of discrete control modules that may act, either individually or in combination, to generate a variety of motor behaviors. The experimental findings indicate that the simultaneous activation of two modules leads to the vectorial summation of their output forces. These findings have led us to consider the output generated by the spinal cord as a system of vector-valued basis functions. In this context, the execution of complex motor behaviors and the adaptation to novel environments may be investigated as forms of function approximation.