Learning to act in time

Knowing when a beat will arrive is not the same as being able to tap along with it. Our senses and movements take time and are never perfectly precise. We investigate how practice and feedback help us turn predictions into well-timed actions, and adapt when our bodies, tools, or surroundings change. A musician playing with others, for example, must anticipate the next moment while responding to what has just happened. We ask how people learn to combine these sources of information, which timing errors they correct, and how they adjust when feedback becomes delayed or unreliable.

This direction draws on internal-model accounts of how the brain predicts the consequences of movement (Wolpert et al., 1995), and optimal feedback control, which explains how movements are corrected according to their goals (Todorov & Jordan, 2002). These ideas guide our questions about how prediction and feedback work together. We are interested in how practice changes their coordination, allowing an action to remain precise while adapting to a changing situation.