Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · 1d

Happy World Octopus Day. Here's a recent paper demonstrating octopuses have a sense of body ownership similar to mamals and rodents.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

Rubber arm illusion in octopus

The feeling of a body as belonging to oneself is called the sense of body ownership and the centerpiece of conscious experience. Kawashima and Ikeda investigated the sense of body ownership in an octo...

www.cell.com

2 3

Reposted by Alan Wrench

Auditory-Visual Speech Association (AVISA) @avsp.bsky.social · 20d

Temporal integration in human auditory cortex is predominantly yoked to absolute time www.nature.com/articles/s41... There's a difference between integrating across absolute time & structure (say) phonemes. Do cortical computations reflect time or structure? Results showed time-yoked computations ⏱️

Temporal integration in human auditory cortex is predominantly yoked to absolute time - Nature Neuroscience

Temporal integration throughout the human auditory cortex is predominantly locked to absolute time and does not vary with the duration of speech structures such as phonemes or words.

www.nature.com

1 3 12

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · 22d

Note all the articulation happening in the posterior tongue and hyoid which is not captured by EMA.

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · 22d

Co-registered EMA and ultrasound. From top left: Ultrasound with tongue contour, Ultrasound keypoints, 3D head with EMA sensors, , Spectrogram, Glossogram showing vocal tract constrictions in red cavities in blue, waveform. Movie created by AAA app. Use settings to hear audio.

1 1 5

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · 26d

Yup.

JJ @jjodx.bsky.social · 26d

The myth of optimality in human movement science

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The myth of optimality in human movement science

The concept of optimality dominates contemporary human movement science, with researchers across biomechanics, motor control, and neuroscience routine…

www.sciencedirect.com

1

Reposted by Alan Wrench

Thomas Hueber @thueber.bsky.social · Sep 1

🚨 Open PhD Position – Grenoble, France 🚨

Join us at GIPSA-lab to explore how Speech Language Models can learn like children: through physical and social interaction. Think AI, robots, development 🧠🤖🎙️
Fully funded (3 yrs) • @cnrs.fr / @ugrenoblealpes.bsky.social
Details 👉 tinyurl.com/bde988b3

tinyurl.com

7 8

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Sep 1

I understand that you need to minimize kit to take to remote parts. A mirror would be convenient. I think we need to do two things. Change the 50mm camera for a wide angle one so that a peripheral mirror is in view. Then design a 45° mirror mount to fit on the side camera mount. I can try this out.

3

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Sep 1

Hi Matt, AAA can only record one video channel for reasons to do with having to associate splines with input data streams and also the large amount of disk space that would accumulate. In the past we used a CCTV camera mixer. However, I purchased one recently and couldn't get it to work.

1 1

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Aug 22

x.com/i/status/195...

Video of Prof Takayuki Arai with his vocal tract models at #Interspeech2025
Love this analogue demonstration.

2

Reposted by Alan Wrench

Jonathan A. Michaels @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social · Aug 16

We're thrilled to introduce ATHENA: Automatically Tracking Hands Expertly with No Annotations – our open-source, Python-based toolbox for 3D markerless hand tracking!

Paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10....

2 7 52

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Aug 19

Really? github.com/HKUDS/DeepCode
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRgm...
Paper2Code: Convert research papers into working implementations
Text2Web: Generate frontend applications from descriptions
Text2Backend: Create scalable backend systems automatically
Auto Code Validation: Guaranteed working code

DeepCode

YouTube video by Zongwei Li

www.youtube.com

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Aug 15

Royal Society of Edinburgh workshop this September run by drjoanma.bsky.social from Queen Margaret University.

rse.org.uk/event/swallo...

Swallowing in a new light: how ultrasound could transform care

In this hands-on, interactive workshop, you'll explore how ultrasound is opening a new window into the science of swallowing.

rse.org.uk

3 2

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Aug 14

The work coming out of the Person lab is a must-read for me. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This new paper shows that cerebellar output neurons encode both predictive and corrective movements, mechanistically linking feedforward and feedback control.

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Jul 22

Sosnik et al 2004 link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Sosnik et al 2006 link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Sosnik et al 2007 journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10....

When practice leads to co-articulation: the evolution of geometrically defined movement primitives - Experimental Brain Research

The skilled generation of motor sequences involves the appropriate choice, ordering and timing of a sequence of simple, stereotyped movement elements. Nevertheless, a given movement element within a w...

link.springer.com

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Jul 22

With my interest in speech, I very much welcome this new work on limb movement sequences. Readers may also be interested in the seminal series of papers published 20 years ago on this topic by Sosnik et al most recently cited by @galeaj.bsky.social (refs 12-14) journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

The effects of haloperidol on motor vigour and movement fusion during sequential reaching

Reward is a powerful tool to enhance human motor behaviour with previous research showing that during a sequential reaching movement, a monetary incentive leads to increased speed of each movement (mo...

journals.plos.org

1

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Jul 19

Although I no longer subscribe to the Equilibrium Point Hypothesis as currently formulated, this proposal is intriguing.

Almanzor et al. (2025). Self-organising bio-inspired reflex circuits for robust motor coordination in artificial musculoskeletal systems.
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

1

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Jul 13

Not inconsistent with the proposal that an initial feedforward motor cortical pulse determines direction and velocity of movement and a step change near peak velocity modulates deceleration to bring the movement on target. This paper, finds that the cerebellum generates the deceleration step change.

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Jul 13

"we discovered a naturally occurring PC population suppression during mouse reaching movements that scaled with the velocity of outreach and occurred shortly before the transition to the decelerative phase of movement." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Cerebellar associative learning underlies skilled reach adaptation

Cerebellar output has been shown to enhance movement precision by scaling the decelerative phase of reaching movements in mice. We hypothesized that during reach, initial kinematics cue late-phase adj...

www.biorxiv.org

1

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Jul 12

I believe the cerebellum and possibly motor nuclei learn and map the expected sensory input for a given set of feedforward muscle activations. If there is a mismatch, the cerebellum generates corrective output. If the mismatch persists the cerebellum slowly adapts to the new sensory expectation.

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Jul 9

Nice paper but overlooks the groundbreaking and elegant work describing movement sequence learning. Sosnik, R., Hauptmann, B., Karni, A., & Flash, T. (2004). When practice leads to co-articulation: the evolution of geometrically defined movement primitives. Experimental Brain Research, 156, 422-438.

1 2

Reposted by Alan Wrench

strath-psh.bsky.social @strath-psh.bsky.social · May 29

A new article by @maria-cairney.bsky.social, @drjoannecleland.bsky.social and colleagues reporting promising results in a trial on using #ultrasound biofeedback #speechtherapy for children with #cleft palate ± lip.

#SLT #openaccess

tinyurl.com/3jnamh7e

Quantitative results of SonoSpeech Cleft Pilot: a mixed-methods pilot randomised control trial of ultrasound visual biofeedback versus standard intervention for children with cleft palate ± cleft lip ...

Background Despite its growing popularity, there is limited evidence of the effectiveness of ultrasound visual biofeedback speech therapy for children with cleft palate ± cleft lip (CP ± L). This stud...

link.springer.com

3 4

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · May 27

Video corresponding to above glossogram. Red line is midsagittal tongue contour automatically estimated using #DeepLabCut Blue line indicates base of mandible to hyoid and purple line indicates base of mandible to short tendon. In collaboration with @drjoanma.bsky.social

2

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · May 27

Glossogram with dark red indicating constriction and blue diagonal (tongue compartment contracted) demonstrating peristaltic transfer of water bolus from oral-pharyngeal. This is easiest to explain as sequential extension of neuromuscular compartments of the tongue.

1 4 7

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · May 1

Great to see this out. Will read it carefully.

1

Alan Wrench @awrench.bsky.social · Apr 16

direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

Debunking the Myth of Excitatory and Inhibitory Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in Cognitive Neuroscience Research

Abstract. Repetitive TMS (rTMS) is a powerful neuroscientific tool with the potential to noninvasively identify brain–behavior relationships in humans. Early work suggested that certain rTMS protocols...

direct.mit.edu