Alumni of the Laboratory for Computational Motor Control

Siavash Vaziri

Siavash Vaziri, 2004 Siavash Vaziri, 2005

Siavash joined the lab as a MS BME student in 2004. He worked on saccadic remapping of reach target. He made an important observation: the brain combines predicted sensory consequences of motor commands with actual sensory feedback to produce an estimate that is better than either source of information. That is, as the brain predicts consequences of movements, it acquires the ability to sense the world better than is possible from the sensors alone. He demonstrated that we see the world better than what our eyes tell us because we can predict what we should see. After completing his MS, he joined the PhD program in BME at Johns Hopkins, working in the area of cortical neurophysiology. His results were published in the following works: Why does the brain predict sensory consequences of oculomotor commands?  Optimal integration of the predicted and the actual sensory feedback. S Vaziri, J Diedrichsen, and R Shadmehr (2006) Journal of Neuroscience, 26:4188-4197.  Abstract Citations Saccadic remapping of reach targets. Siavash Vaziri (2006) MS Thesis, Johns Hopkins University.