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.
Paradoxical Modulation of Motor Actions by Attention
JooHyun Song, Brown University, USA
Vision is crucial not only for recognizing objects, but also for guiding actions. Most real-world visual scenes are complex and crowded with many different objects competing for attention and action. In order to efficiently guide motor actions, the visual system must be capable of selecting one object as the target of the current action, while suppressing the wealth of other irrelevant possibilities. It is generally accepted that more perceptually salient stimuli are able to attract attention automatically and thus are more disruptive to behavior than weakly salient distractors. Yet, counter intuitively, we recently discovered dissociable effects of salience on perception and action: while highly salient stimuli interfere strongly with perceptual processing, increased physical salience or associated value attenuates action-related interference. Thus, this result suggests the existence of salience-triggered suppression mechanisms specific to goal-directed actions. Furthermore, we observed that attentional distraction does not impair the original learning of a simple visuomotor rotational adaptation task. Paradoxically, successful recall of the visuomotor skill only occurs when a similar level of attentional distraction is present. This finding suggests that performing a distractor task acts as an internal ‘attentional context’ for encoding and retrieving of motor memory. Therefore without consideration of internal task contexts in real-life situations, the success of learning and rehabilitation programs may be undermined. Taken together, understanding integrated attention-action systems provides new insights into our seamlessly interaction with a complex external world.
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