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.
The Time for Action Is at Hand
David Rosenbaum, University of California, Riverside, USA
Watch a toddler use a broom or a robot fold laundry and the skill used for everyday tasks becomes obvious. Yet the ease with which neuro-typical adults carry out such tasks is generally taken for granted. Such activities are often viewed as cognitively unsophisticated, perhaps because academic training is not required to achieve them, and people who perform such tasks for a living occupy the lowest rung of society. The bias against the view that physical action is cognitively sophisticated is so deeply rooted that psychology, the science of mental life and behavior, has paid scant attention to the means by which mental life is translated into physical actions. Even within this workshop, whose speakers include the most enlightened researchers in the world, motor control is more often viewed as a window into perception and cognition than as a topic of interest in its own right. In a 2005 American Psychologist article, called the Cinderella of Psychology, I suggested that the relegation of motor control to the sidelines of psychology has a number of historical causes. I will briefly review those causes in my talk and comment on signs that things are improving. Echoing the view of others who emphasize that action cannot be divorced from cognition, I will review work from my own lab and others that probe the processes underlying physical action selection and control. These lines of work indicate that the time for integration of action research with research on cognition, perception, and emotion is at hand.
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