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.
Choice Reaching with a LEGO Arm Robot (CoRLEGO)
Dietmar Heinke, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
I will present a neurobiologically inspired robotics model, termed CoRLEGO (Choice reaching with a LEGO arm robot). CoRLEGO’s architecture is based on the assumption that the process of selecting reaching targets can leak into the motor system (i.e., leakage effect). In CoRLEGO this leakage effect was implemented with neurobiologically plausible, dynamic neural fields (DNF); competitive target selection and topological representations of motor parameters. CoRLEGO demonstrates how the leakage effect can simulate evidence from Song and colleagues’ choice reaching studies. In their experiments participants are asked to reach an item presented on the screen. Usually, the reach target is defined by its colour oddity (i.e., a green square among red squares or vice versa). These experiments show that non-target items can divert the reaching movement away from the ideal trajectory to the target item (i.e., the curvature effect) and that the curvature effect declines with repetitions of the target colour (i.e., colour priming). An extension of CoRLEGO can mimic findings that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the motor cortex modulates the colour priming effect (Woodgate et al., 2015). The extension of CoRLEGO includes feedback connections from the motor system to the brain’s attentional system (parietal cortex) guide visual attention to extract movement-relevant information (i.e., colour) from visual stimuli. This work adds to growing evidence that there is a close interaction between the motor system and the attention system. This view is different from the traditional conceptualization of the motor system as the endpoint of a serial chain of processing stages.
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