, 2011). We argue that the rodent sensorimotor system can be a cornerstone for the impact of neuroscience in areas of motion control that range from algorithm design for robotics to insights into normal and dysfunctional aspects of human motor activities. This review is dedicated to Prof. Wallace I. Welker, late of the

University of Wisconsin, whose prescient studies taught us to view the circuitry of the vibrissa system in light of the behavioral strategies of rodents, and whose papers remind us that computations in the vibrissa system start and end at the brainstem. We thank our colleagues Ehud Ahissar, Matthew E. Diamond, Adrienne L. Fairhall, Jeffrey C. Magee, Bert Sakmann, Haim signaling pathway Sompolinsky, and Karel Svoboda, and members of their respective laboratories, for discussions that shaped this review, Ehud Ahissar, Harvey J. Karten, Charles F. Stevens,

the anonymous reviewers, and especially Jeffrey D. Moore for comments on the submitted version, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (grant Birinapant research buy MT-5877), the National Institutes of Health (grant NS058668), and the US-Israeli Binational Foundation (grant 2003222) for their support. “
“Biology, like other scientific disciplines, has its model systems. For example, E. coli, C. elegans, and Drosophila are considered simple experimental systems for the discovery of molecular, cellular, and genetic mechanisms that then generalize enough to untested species. In motor neuroscience we also have various model systems. The assumption that findings in model systems can generalize is implicit to the neuroscientific enterprise in so much that work in multiple model systems is ongoing, funded, and published. It is rare, however, to find any explicit mention of the logic underlying the choice

of a particular model system, beyond perhaps its experimental tractability, and even more rare to find overt comparisons made between model systems in the motor learning literature (but see Olveczky, 2011 and Shadmehr and Wise, 2005). Choice of model system should be based on judicious use of knowledge of phylogenetic relationships and these chosen model systems should be distributed widely across the tree of life in order to reduce the risk of studying an idiosyncratic species ( Krakauer et al., 2011). Use of the term phylogeny is likely to seem jarring in a review about motor learning and, if so, speaks to the almost complete absence of evolutionary considerations in the mainstream motor control or motor learning literature.