Shlomi Haar

Postdoctoral Fellow

Shlomi joined the Brain & Behaviour lab in 2017 as a Royal Society – Kohn International Fellow studying the dynamics of real-world motor learning and its neural correlates. Shlomi has BSc and MSc in Biomedical Engineering, and PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. In His PhD he studied the encoding of arm movement in the human brain by running motor experiments with humans using fMRI. Following his fellowship in the Brain & Behaviour lab, Shlomi was appointed as an Edmond and Lily Safra Research Fellow at the Department of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London.

Research Brief

The neural mechanisms of human motor control and learning evolved in free behaving, real-life settings, yet to date we study these questions in highly simplified lab-based settings. In this project we demonstrate the feasibility of studying real-world neuroscience in-the-wild, using entirely data-driven approaches combined with wearable technologies to track full-body kinematics and brain activity. We use the competitive sports of pool billiard to frame an unconstrained real-world skill learning experiment which is amenable to predictive modelling and understanding. Our data-driven approach unfolds the structure and complexity of movement, variability, and motor-learning and reveals a multi-modal learning mechanism which is employed differently by different types of learners. We identify novel neurobehavioural components in real-world skill learning that were not found in simplified lab-tasks.