Devika Narain

I grew up in the Indian desert state of Rajasthan and after obtaining a degree in engineering in Bangalore, I went to study neuroscience and applied mathematics at Stanford, California, and afterwards, cognitive psychology at LMU, Munich. I am now a PhD student at the faculty of human movement sciences at the Vrije University in Amsterdam.

We study how humans learn to intercept moving objects in space and time. A simple task of catching a ball, for instance, is performed by many humans with and great ease and skill. Even the most sophisticated robots today cannot reasonably match the dexterity and skill of human movement in such dynamic visuo-motor tasks. With this in mind, it might be profitable to study and understand how the brain acquires information about moving things, processes this input, and eventually learns to make such movements. If we could determine how the brain coordinates control over such a system and if we could arrive at a mathematical model that describes this process, we could use it as a model to understand motor disease, human peak performance, age-related motor dysfunction, and implement it in biologically inspired robotics. Our methods include psychophysical experiments and modeling of empirical evidence using the Bayesian framework.