The goal of this workshop was to advance the understanding of how cognition and action systems are integrated and operate synergistically. This knowledge of how humans efficiently interact and navigate in complex environments is vital for generating a comprehensive understanding of human behavior and will help shape the design of everyday objects and training and working environments. One poignant example is computer technology. Human-computer interfaces equipped with gestural and tangible technologies are becoming increasingly accessible and ubiquitous in educational, leisure, and work settings. A thorough understanding of the interactions between cognition and action is needed help designers engineer devices and environments that maximize the functionality and usability. Thus, the workshop will bring together a diverse group of scholars in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, kinesiology, and human-computer interactions to share and critically evaluate their cutting-edge theoretical, empirical, and translational developments.
Note: Some videos from this workshop may appear slightly altered to protect the privacy of individuals pictured in presentations.
Interactions Between the Dorsal and Ventral
Visual Streams in the Production of Skilled Movements
Melvyn Goodale, The University of Western Ontario, Canada
Human beings are capable of reaching out and grasping objects with great accuracy and precision – and vision plays a critical role in the control of this ability. The visual guidance of these skilled movements, however, requires transformations of incoming visual information that are quite different from those required for visual perception. For us to grasp an object successfully, our brain must compute the actual (absolute) size of the goal object, and its orientation and position with respect to our hand and fingers – and must ignore the relative size or distance of the object with respect to other elements in the visual array. These differences in the required computations have led to the emergence of dedicated visuomotor modules in the dorsal visual stream that are separate from the networks in the ventral visual stream that mediate our conscious perception of the world. But even though the dorsal stream may allow an observer to reach out and grasp objects with exquisite ease, it is trapped in the present. By itself, the dorsal stream can deal only with objects that are visible when the action is being programmed. The ventral stream, however, allows an observer to escape the present and bring to bear information from the past – including information about the function of objects, their intrinsic properties, and their location with reference to other objects in the world. Ultimately then, both streams contribute to the production of goal-directed actions.
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