Projects
Affordances and visual processing
If a person is ready to perform a specific action, does this bias perception in action-relevant ways? Do people sample and encode information from the visual world differently depending on how their bodies are situated? How does physical interaction with a scene shape what people remember about it?
Research suggests that when people view objects that are within their reach, they show changes in perception, attention, and memory. We have found that both the actions people are ready to take as they perform visual tasks and the actions people perform before completing visual tasks can alter how they process visual information. For example, if you're ready to catch a ball, our work suggests you'll have increased sensitivity to visual signals about motion, while if you're ready to thread a needle, you'll be more sensitive to fine spatial details.
Current work in the Action and Cognition Lab continues to investigate how a readiness to act and recent action experiences tune visual cognition to facilitate interacting with the environment.
Tool use, peripersonal space, and the body schema
How do people represent their immediate surroundings and how do these representations change as a function of experience? What factors influence awareness of the position and configuration of the body? Are there conditions under which people feel as if a tool is an extension of their own bodies?
Research suggests that people represent the space surrounding the body differently than the space outside of the area where interactions with the environment occur, emphasizing multisensory integration of information relevant to action goals and defensive maneuvering. Some evidence suggests these special representations can expand and contract based on recent experiences and may even change when people extend the space over which they can act by using tools. We have found that some of the changes in visual processing associated with information viewed near the hands’ grasping space also occur near the ends of tools, but that these effects are not necessarily tied to tools’ functionality.
Current work in the Action and Cognition Lab continues to explore how, when, and why actors experience changes in their representation of the space immediately surrounding the body.
Actions and problem solving
Can we direct people to move in ways that influence how they think? Is it possible to plant an idea in someone's head just by asking them to perform a specific action? Can we make the body move in ways that guide the mind?
We have found that when people are trying to solve a difficult spatial reasoning problem, we can help them succeed by getting them to move in a pattern related to the problem's solution. For example, if you're trying to solve a problem that requires you to make a string swing back and forth, our work suggests you'd be more likely to solve this problem if we asked you to swing your arms first. Even though people are often unaware of the relationship between the actions we direct them to take and the problem they are trying to solve, their actions prime thoughts that make them more likely to find the correct solution.
Current work in the Action and Cognition Lab continues to study the relationship between directed actions and problem solving, investigating the mechanisms that enable a pattern of actions to trigger insight.