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About

Sae Franklin is a motor control and sensorimotor neuroscience researcher whose work centers on how the human brain learns, adapts to, and stabilizes movement in the face of novel and uncertain dynamics. Her most influential contribution, "Visuomotor feedback gains upregulate during the learning of novel dynamics" (2012, 139 citations), revealed a fundamental mechanism in motor learning: early in adapting to new force environments, the sensorimotor system temporarily elevates feedback-driven corrections before gradually transitioning to efficient feedforward control. This insight reshaped understanding of how internal models are built during motor adaptation. Franklin's subsequent research has systematically extended this framework, demonstrating that feedback gains are tuned to specific task dynamics, modulated by internal model uncertainty, and sensitive to sensory delays. Her work on inverted pendulum stabilization elegantly dissects visual and haptic contributions to balance control, while her investigations into limb posture reveal how the motor system strategically manages impedance and stability simultaneously. Her 2023 findings suggest that congruent visual cues can accelerate dynamic motor learning, pointing toward practical applications in rehabilitation and training. Collectively, her research provides a mechanistically rich account of how biological controllers adaptively balance feedback and prediction to achieve robust motor performance.