ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on more integrative functional models of the brain’s organization, in particular on distributed hierarchical systems that incorporate the other more local elementary mechanisms related to representations and computations. Representations play a role in various processes, such as perceptual observation, memory, awareness and attention, but also in motor processes. Representations of motor processes consist of specific coordinates of the successive body parts like hand and fingers, from the start to the end of a motion range. Representations vary according to the active or passive state of their related neural assemblies: active representations represent elements of short-term memory, passive representations the dormant versions of the same elements in long-term memory. Control of movement depends on various trajectories, involving sequences of coordinates of body segments, muscle coordinates or joint angles stored in the motor cortices. Control of movements globally comprises three levels of computation of increasing specificity: action programming, instruction generation and movement execution.
