Hugo Bruggeman
Born and raised in the Netherlands, Dr. Bruggeman received his B.Sc. in Human Movement Sciences from Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam, the Netherlands). He then obtained a position as a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota with Professor Gordon Legge.
He was able to extend his Minnesota visit and became a graduate student at the Department of Psychology completing his Ph.D. in Cognitive and Biological Psychology in 2004. His dissertation research, under the supervision of Professor Herbert Pick, addressed the cognition of purposeful motor-actions; how action helps guide and adapt perception-action cycles rather than just being a response to input. As a paradigm he used learning to throw on a rotating carousel; very similar to that featured on Science@NASA.
Following his graduate work, Hugo became a post doctoral fellow at Brown University, where he currently works in Professor Bill Warren’s laboratory studying the perceptual control of locomotion.
His research interests have remained the same, how action helps guide and adapt perception-action cycles. He generally conducts experiments aimed at understanding how people learn to adjust a motor-action to fit with varying environmental conditions. Additional research methodologies include: modeling techniques to identify how constraints of human and environment contribute to such mechanisms; and human factors procedures to formulate design guidelines for tools and other artifacts that capitalize on natural mappings between perceptual information and motor-action patterns.
His research has been published in international peer reviewed journals, including; Proceedings of the IEEE, Experimental Brain Research, Neuropsychologia, and Current Biology.