Sabbatical Jean-Jacques Orban de Xivry: expanding horizons in neuroimaging, sensory acuity and motor abilities

My laboratory focuses on the understanding of the effect of aging on sensory and motor functions thanks to behavioral experiments inside and outside of the laboratory and cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques. The sabbatical stay at Western University aims at gaining further expertise in each of these areas, which will be leveraged for future projects at KU Leuven. I want to learn multivariate techniques for functional neuroimaging studies in order to investigate the importance of sensory and motor noise during motor tasks and for motor learning. Back to the KU Leuven, I will be able to apply these techniques in order to study age-related changes in sensory and motor representations and to test models of overactivation for the cerebellum. These will allow me to test current models of aging and the role of the cerebellum in compensating for a deficit in cortical processing of sensory information and the execution of motor tasks. During my sabbatical stay, I will design and pilot a series of tasks that can be used in the clinics and that rely on the unconscious use of proprioceptive and tactile information. These tasks will depart from the tasks currently used, which depend on verbal/conscious report of the position of one limb. Upon my return at KU Leuven, I will use these tasks in patients with chemotherapy-induced neuropathies and in stroke patients. The last project of my sabbatical focuses on the implementation of a study to investigate motor learning during everyday life activities. We will ask participants to wear weights on their arm during everyday life activities and to wear accelerometers/gyroscopes and textile-based electromyography recordings. Such new techniques will be essential for future studies at KU Leuven on biking abilities in young and older adults and for the assessment of motor function at home based on accelerometers and ecological tasks