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John F. Soechting, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Neuroscience E-mail: soech001@umn.edu

Research Interests:

The grace of a basketball player or of a modern dancer has always fascinated me. How does the brain act to produce such skilled coordinated movements? We are far from answering these questions but my colleagues and I are working toward that goal by studying simpler movements which, I think, still capture the essentials of the problem of movements and coordination. We have been studying arm movements which require coordination of motion at the shoulder, elbow and wrist. Most of the work is done on human subjects and involves measuring motion in three dimensions and recording the activity of muscles which produce this motion. The nature of the problem has made this work highly interdisciplinary; we use techniques from psychology (psychophysics) and physiology to robotics and computer simulations. My approach has been to begin by studying behavior and to use a description of behavior to develop hypotheses concerning what the brain is doing to produce that behavior. The next step then is to test hypotheses by means of electrophysiological recording from behaving animals.

Selected Publications:

(For a comprehensive list of recent publications, refer to PubMed, a service provided by the National Library of Medicine.)

Winges SA, Soechting JF, Flanders M. Multidigit control of contact forces during transport of handheld objects. J Neurophysiol. 2007 Aug;98(2):851-60.

Mrotek LA, Soechting JF. Target interception: hand-eye coordination and strategies. J Neurosci. 2007 Jul 4;27(27):7297-309.

Kerrigan SJ, Soechting JF. Anisotropies in the gain of smooth pursuit during two-dimensional tracking as probed by brief perturbations. Exp Brain Res. 2007 Jul;180(3):435-48.

McFarland J, Soechting JF. Factors influencing the radial-tangential illusion in haptic perception. Exp Brain Res. 2007 Apr;178(2):216-27.

Mrotek LA, Soechting JF. Predicting curvilinear target motion through an occlusion. Exp Brain Res. 2007 Mar;178(1):99-114.

Soechting JF, Song W, Flanders M. Haptic feature extraction. Cereb Cortex. 2006 Aug;16(8):1168-80.

Mrotek LA, Flanders M, Soechting JF. Oculomotor responses to gradual changes in target direction. Exp Brain Res. 2006 Jun;172(2):175-92.

Soechting JF, Poizner H. The use of motion cues in the haptic sense of circularity. Exp Brain Res. 2005 Sep;165(4):413-21.

Henriques DY, Soechting JF.   Approaches to the study of haptic sensing. J Neurophysiol. 2005 Jun;93(6):3036-43.

Henriques DY, Flanders M, Soechting JF.   Distortions in the visual perception of shape. Exp Brain Res. 2005 Jan;160(3):384-93.

Soechting JF, Mrotek LA, Flanders M.   Smooth pursuit tracking of an abrupt change in target direction: vector superposition of discrete responses. Exp Brain Res. 2005 Jan;160(2):245-58.

Smith MA, Soechting JF. Modulation of grasping forces during object transport. J Neurophysiol. 2005 Jan;93(1):137-45.

Song W, Flanders M, Soechting JF. Effect of compliance on haptic perception of curvature. Somatosens Mot Res. 2004 Sep-Dec;21(3-4):177-82.

Engel KC, Anderson JH, Gomez CM, Soechting JF.   Deficits in ocular and manual tracking due to episodic ataxia type 2. Mov Disord. 2004 Jul;19(7):778-87.

Former Graduate Students:

Dr. Chris Buneo (Ph.D. 1996) Post-Doctoral Fellow, California Institute of Technology, Division of Biology.

Kevin Engel (Ph.D. 2001, Neuroscience, University of Minnesota).

Leigh Ann Mrotek (Neuroscience, University of Minnesota).

Stephen Helms Tillery (Ph.D. 1994, Neuroscience, University of Minnesota).