 Professor
Peter Redgrave
Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield
Email: P.Redgrave@sheffield.ac.uk
Web: click
here
Research Interests:
For the past 20 years I have been interested in the sensory guidance
of movement. The model system I have studied is the rodent midbrain
superior colliculus. Anatomical, physiological and behavioural
analyses of the relatively direct sensory input and motor output
has lead to the conclusion that the colliculus is critical for
the re-direction of gaze towards, or away from unexpected, biologically
salient events. My work in this area has involved the study of
the anatomy and physiology underlying orienting, approach, escape
and avoidance and epileptic seizures. Much of this work has been
conducted in collaboration with Paul Dean, Max Westby, Safa Shehab
and Shaomei Wang here in Sheffield, and with John McHaffie and
Barry Stein at the Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina.
A modern view
of the brain is that it represents a 'society' of distributed,
parallel processing functional units each with the capacity to
guide or influence movement. The superior colliculus can be seen
as one of these units. Recently, in collaboration with Kevin Gurney,
Tony Prescott and John Mayhew, I have become interested in the
issue of how the superior colliculus might share access to the
limited motor and cognitive resources of the brain with other,
potentially competing functional systems. We have recently (1999)
proposed that the architecture of the vertebrate basal ganglia
is ideally configured to resolve this selection/scheduling problem.
We now have several computer simulations of basal ganglia circuitry,
including one that can dynamically select the actions of a mobile
robot. This work has shown that basal ganglia architecture has
the capacity to generate coherent sequences of action selection
which enables the robot to perform a 'purposive' task . This work
continues while collaborations with Mayhew and Paul Overton in
Sheffield and McHaffie, Stein and Terry Stanford in the USA are
testing biological hypotheses derived from the computational work.
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