Building a dance in the human brain: insights from expert and novice dancers

Dance requires a great degree of coordination not only between the different limbs of the body, but also between perception and action, and time and space. Of particular interest to neuroscientists is the remarkable plasticity of the human brain to integrate different types of physical and perceptual experiences in order to learn new movements. In this chapter, the author introduces work he and his colleagues have performed with expert dancers that probed questions of the neural representation of whole-body action expertise. He discusses findings from several studies performed with novice dancers through which he addressed questions concerning how different types of learning, as well as different cues to learning, shape action perception. The author investigates observational learning by training novice dancers to perform complex dance movement sequences while manipulating training elements. He concludes with a brief discussion of the broader implications for this work and suggests several directions for future research.