Research Overview
My research concerns the cognition of purposeful motor-actions; how action helps guide and adapt perception-action cycles rather than just being a response to input. I conduct experiments aimed at understanding how people learn to adjust a motor-action to fit with varying environmental conditions; consider the adaptation of throwing needed to playing ball on a windy day. I track a person’s learning across repeated practice trials and then test what exactly they have learned. For some studies, I simply measure accuracy in task performance, but in other studies I use a motion analysis system to track the time-related changes in movement patterns. Lately, I have begun applying dynamic systems modeling techniques to help identify how constraints of the organism, environment and task contribute to produce the observed behavior.
My studies are furthermore characterized by the largely unexplored question of what movement tasks are really of the same kind and what kinds of actions are truly different. Consider, once more, the example of playing ball; if underhanded throwing is corrected for a tail wind that drives the ball over a longer distance, does this generalize to overhanded throwing. This kind of question is thus aimed at examining the nature of control that yields a functionally equivalent family of movement tasks, despite variability in muscular-articular coordination.
It is here — understanding of the organization of functionally equivalent actions — that my research has implications for human factors. In one of my earlier studies I defined the visual requirements of devices for reading print for people with low vision. I, subsequently, applied these “rules” to the design of web pages to improve the accessibility of the Internet.