Title: Psychology / Biopsychology / 08_Motor
Tags: Biopsychology::08_Motor Biopsychology::Semester_2

Q: Other than the primary motor area, what other 2 motor areas are there?
A: pre motor area
supplementary motor area

Q: Other than the cortex, what other part of the brain can actively/consciously control movement?
A: The right red nucleus. However, it only handles very gross motor skills.

Q: What are somatotopic representations?
A: The concept that neighbouring body parts also have neighbouring representations in the motor related areas.

Q: Does the body mass of a body part correlate to the size of the neuronal representation?
A: No. E.g. the hands and the face occupy significantly larger areas in the cortex when compared to the legs and arms.

Q: When does the premotor cortex fire?
A: When an action is being planned. While the action is being executed, there is no more activation.

Q: What is the main role of the supplementary motor area?
A: It sends packages of complex sequential movements to the primary motor area.

Q: When doing complex sequences of movements, why is there a delay between an inhibition of the SMA and the stopping of the action?
A: Because the action sequences are transmitted as packages → some part of the sequence was already delivered beforehand and can still be executed.

Q: What does the primary MA do with the movement sequence it gets from the SMA?
A: It sends it down the spinal cord towards the motor neurons.

Q: What are alpha motor neurons?
A: Neurons that are located in the spinal cord that directly connect to muscle fibre with their axons.

Q: What determines how finely grained a muscle can be controlled?
A: The number of motor neurons targetting that muscle.

Q: Aside from the axons going down the spinal cord, what other 2 sources do alpha motor neurons get input from?
A: sensory input
spinal interneurons

Q: How does the polysynaptic flexor and crossed-extensor reflex work?
A: The sensory input is strong enough to trigger a reflex (e.g. stepped on a nail)
The input is processed at interneurons, which excite the flexor and inhibit the extendor on the site of the leg that got the sensory input.
This effect is mirrored on the other side to keep balance. (exciting extendor and inhibiting flexor)

Q: What is the concept of mirrorneurons?
A: Certain neurons that are responsible for certain motor actions also activate when observing these actions being performed by others.

Q: What is the hypothesized use of the mirror neuron phenomenon?
A: Imitation and learning through observation

Q: How could walking without a brain function on a neuronal level?
A: A certain loop configuration in the flexor-stressor circuit could result in alternating flexor and extendor activations. (Every activation on one side inhibits the other one to a certain extend, upon which this dynamic is turned around)