Faculty Spotlight: Jonathan Tsay

Jonathan Tsay is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. His research focuses on cognitive neuroscience, computational modelling, neuropsychology and psychophysics. His work is informed and inspired by how the human body performs everyday movements.

Tell me about your scholarly work.

Our lab’s mission is to understand how humans master a seemingly limitless repertoire of movements – from brewing coffee to parallel parking. To achieve this, we combine mathematical modelling, behavioural observations and neuropsychological studies of patients with brain disorders to identify the mechanisms of motor learning. Ultimately, our goal is to translate these insights into practice: advancing physical rehabilitation, enhancing human performance and informing the design of next-generation brain-computer interfaces.

How is your scholarly work adding to the greater field?

Our work has advanced the field in three core areas. First, we’ve reframed motor learning as an active, psychological process – rooted in problem solving, refined through deliberate practice and consolidated through memory retrieval – challenging the long-standing view that motor learning operates in a reflexive and automatic manner. Second, we’ve proposed a unifying perspective on the cerebellum, conjecturing that its unique role is to rapidly generate predictions in continuous domains such as space and time. This conjecture may inspire experiments that deepen our understanding of this often-overlooked structure. Finally, we’ve created tools and tutorials to democratize motor learning research beyond the laboratory.

How did you become interested in this topic?

My path to motor learning has been anything but straight. The first spark came from basketball, where my fascination with movement collided with a knee injury that redirected my focus from basic science to rehabilitation and set me on the path to becoming a physical therapist. The second spark came during my internship at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, where I realized that our ability to restore movement was fundamentally limited by how little we understood about the brain’s learning mechanisms. That insight set me on the path to motor learning research.

What are you most excited to accomplish as a faculty member at CMU?

CMU fosters truly interdisciplinary research. In collaboration with the Entertainment Technology Center, we are investigating how people acquire sign language and dexterity through a gamified environment. Partnerships with colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh allow us to probe the role of proprioception in motor learning by stimulating spinal circuits and tracking brain activity in individuals with brain-computer interfaces. Being housed in CMU’s Psychology Department – home to experts in perception, cognition, action and health – provides a uniquely fertile environment for collaboration. I am excited to leverage this breadth to advance a deeper, multi-level understanding of motor learning.

What are your goals for the next generation of scholars?

My hope for the next generation of scholars is that they remain captivated by the richness of behavior. Even modest, low-tech experiments – when designed with care – can reveal profound psychological principles, reminding us that the simplest observations often illuminate the deepest truths of the mind.