June 2-4, 2006 .."Embodiment, Ego-space, and Action"
Co-organizers: Roberta
Klatzky,
Brian
MacWhinney&Marlene
Behrmann
Co-organizers: Roberta
Klatzky,Brian
MacWhinney&Marlene
Behrmann
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Karen Adolph is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. Her important contribution to the symposium involves her work on the role of perception-action linkages and body schema representations in controlling the development of infant locomotion. Adolph’s studies challenge infants with novel predicaments, such as going up and down slopes or walking with a weighted vest, to observe how they adapt to potentially risky conditions. The study of flexibility in infants is especially revealing because learning takes place within the larger context of developmental change. Over their first two years of life, infants’ bodies, skills, and environments change rapidly and dramatically. Adolph’s detailed diary studies show that infants obtain massive amounts of practice with each posture in development, learning the relevant parameters and appropriate exploratory movements to control balance and select movements adaptively. However, as infants acquire new postures, the relevant parameters change and everything must be relearned. Despite these changes, Adolph shows impressive transfer of learning across contexts (stairs, slopes and cliffs). At the same time, learning does not transfer from previously acquired to new motor skills (sitting, crawling, cruising, and walking). Adolph (2002, 2005) explains these findings in terms of learning sets and proposes that the limits on transfer of learning are the boundaries of each perception-action system.  |
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Marlene Behrmann is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, and has appointments in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh) and in the departments of Neuroscience and Communication Disorders at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research is on the psychological and neural mechanisms that underlie the ability to recognize visual scenes and objects (common objects, faces and words), represent them internally in visual imagery, and interact with them through eye movements, reaching and grasping, and navigation. Her major research approach involves the study of individuals who have sustained brain damage, which selectively affects their ability to carry out these visual processes, including individuals with lesions to parietal cortex and to temporal cortex. This neuropsychological approach is combined with several other methodologies, including measuring accuracy and response time in normal subjects, simulating these visual processes and their breakdown following brain-damage using artificial neural networks, examining the biological substrate using functional neuroimaging to evaluate patterns of cortical activity. |
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Bennett Bertenthal is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the origins and early development of perception, action and representation. His recent research includes studies investigating the early development of the perception of motion information, visual control of posture and reaching, object tracking, object identity, and perception of biological motions. Like Adolph, Bertenthal adopts a conceptual framework that is sensitive to the dynamic interplay between maturation and environmental stimulation. Both researchers rely on insights from both Gibsonian perceptual theory and Bernstein’s action theory. However, whereas Adolph’s work focuses more on the maturation of posture and body dynamics, Bertenthal’s work focuses more on neural maturation and plasticity, as revealed in studies using imagine and electrophysiological methods. Thus, these two developmental researchers can offer complementary views on the mechanisms underlying the growth of embodied representations. Bertenthal also emphasizes a structural and functional dissociation between the perceptual control of actions and the representation of objects, people, and events. |
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Paul Cisek is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology, University of Montreal. His fundamental interest is in the parameters that the brain specifies and controls, and the information from the environment it must employ, in order to implement action. He emphasizes action in the sense of interacting with the world, not isolated movement. His interdisciplinary approach combines computational modeling with neurophysiological research, including multi-electrode recording from the cerebral cortex during reaching-decision tasks. Models developed to explain existing neural and behavioral data are used to motivate further experiments that address such questions as whether multiple movements can be planned in parallel and how the brain handles competition for movement execution. The multiple levels of analysis that are incorporated in Dr. Cisek's research and his combination of computational-level theory with neurophysiological and behavioral measurements make him ideally suited to consider the broad questions addressed in the symposium. |
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Carol Colby is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. Her interest is in how the cerebral cortex mediates cognitive experience. Her current work focuses on spatial cognition in monkeys and humans. This is an important problem for two reasons: First, it encompasses a wide range of cognitive processes including perception, attention, short term memory and generating action, each of which contributes to the construction of internal representations of space. Second, spatial cognition is a faculty shared by humans and nonhuman primates. With humans, Colby uses functional imaging techniques to observe frontal and parietal cortex activation during visuo-spatial performance. With monkeys, recordings from individual cortical neurons reveal the specific aspects of information processing carried out by different types of neurons during spatial tasks. Colby's research has revealed that parietal cortex contains multiple representations of space, each of which is designed to serve distinct attentional and sensorimotor goals, and she has found fundamental parallels between awareness of the environment and activity in parietal neurons. . |
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Jody Culham is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario. Her primary interest is in how visual information is used for perception and to guide actions in human observers. Behavioral, neuropsychological and functional MRI studies are used to document the maps in the human brain, which are involved in using information from the spatial senses (vision, touch and hearing) to plan and guide motor actions. In particular, recent research has focused on mapping parietal regions that are involved with controlling actions, especially grasping, and perceiving motion and she has documented a human area AIP that is activated more when subjects grasp an object (and have to evaluate the object properties) than when they reach for it, much like the properties of the monkey area, AIP which contains cells that fire when the hand is preshaped for a grasp. Her studies go on to show the dissociation between areas that are activated when objects are viewed but are not the target for grasping or reaching versus areas that are selectively activated in the service of action but not perception. |
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Susan M. Fitzpatrick is vice president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, one of a limited number of international grantmakers supporting university-based research in the biological and behavioral sciences. She lectures and writes on issues concerning the role of private philanthropy in the support of scientific research, and on issues related to the public understanding of science. Fitzpatrick was the associate executive director of the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis (1989-1992), a comprehensive basic science and applied science research center focused on restoring neurological function to persons with spinal cord injury. As executive director of the Brain Trauma Foundation (1992-1993), Fitzpatrick guided the Foundation to a position as a leader in advancing the acute care of patients with traumatic brain injury. Fitzpatrick received her B.S. summa cum laude from St. John's University (1978) and her Ph.D. in biochemistry and neurology from Cornell University Medical College (1984). |
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Roberta Klatzky is a Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is also on the faculty of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. Her research interests are in human perception and cognition, with special emphasis on spatial cognition and haptic perception. She has done extensive research on human navigation under visual and nonvisual guidance, haptic and visual object recognition, and motor planning. Her work has application to navigation aids for the blind, haptic interfaces, exploratory robotics, teleoperation, and virtual environments. Particularly relevant to this symposium is Klatzky's work, in collaboration with Loomis, on amodal spatial images that can be formed from multiple modalities and used for updating with navigation. Dr. Klatzky's primary research methodology is behavioral, but she has collaborated on fMRI studies of haptic processing of objects and materials. |
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Guenther Knoblich is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University. Following a Ph.D. at the University of Hamburg, he spent 7 years as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich, Germany. His research focuses on the idea that people use their own sensory systems to understand the actions and expectations of others. In recent work he tested patients suffering from neuropathy that impaired their haptic sense and found them unable to determine whether someone lifting an object was initially deceived about its weight, although they could accurately estimate the lifted weight itself. This suggests that the patients lacked motor representations that are essential to understanding others' actions. Dr. Knoblich is co-editor of a book on how the body plays a special role in perception. He received the 2005 APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology in the area of Perception and Motor Performance. |
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Jack Loomis is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has conducted behavioral research on a very broad range of topics including color vision, tactual perception, visual character recognition, visual space perception, visual control of action, auditory space perception, spatial cognition, social interaction, and development of a navigation aid for blind people. Goals of this work include modeling the processes from stimulus to perception and from perception to recognition and action. Dr. Loomis's work on the spatial image formed from multimodal processing is particularly relevant to this symposium. In collaboration with Roberta Klatzky, that work includes a demonstration of amodal spatial representations that can be formed from vision, audition, and spatial language. Dr. Loomis has also extensively studied updating of the spatial image using optical flow and nonvisual path integration. Few individuals have Dr. Loomis's understanding of multiple spatial modalities. |
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Brian MacWhinney is a Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also on the faculty of Modern Languages and the Language Technologies Institute. His work has examined a variety of issues in first and second language learning and processing. Recently, he has been exploring the role of embodiment in mental imagery as a support for language processing. He proposes that this embodied mental imagery is organized through a system of perspective taking that operates on the levels of direct perception, space/time/aspect, action plans, and social schemas. Grammatical structures, such as pronominalization and relativization, provide methods for signaling perspective switches on each of these levels. He is interested in relating this higher level psycholinguistic account to basic neural and perceptual mechanisms for the construction and projection of body image. |
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Dennis Proffitt is the Commonwealth Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. His broad interests in perception and its relation to action have led him to study the perception of environmental features like slant of hills and distance, preparation for tool use, and imagined perspective taking by rotating the self vs. rotating an object. These interests extend to underlying brain mechanisms and perception/action in immersive virtual environments. Proffitt was led to VR research by a desire to study perceptual skills beyond interactions with passively presented 2-D displays, to include the incorporation of kinesthetic and vestibular cues and purposive actions. These interests dovetail with the goals of the symposium to study the perceiver/actor in the context of the world. Contextual factors that Proffitt has studied include variables related to the perceiver, including age, fatigue, and physical load, as well as variables describing the perceived environment. His work incorporates a variety of response modalities, including haptic imitation as well as the more common verbal report and visual matching. Sometimes the results show co-existing, discrepant representations of space. Proffitt has found, for example, that verbal reports of the height of hills increase after physical exertion, whereas hand-tilt reports are unaffected. . |
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Catherine Reed is Professor of Psychology at Denver University. She has interests in haptic perception, motor performance, and movement recognition. Her work related to embodiment focuses on people's ability to recognize and interpret the actions of others. Her studies address such topics as how body position and direction influence spatial attention, and how one's own actions affect processing of movement at physical, social and emotional levels. She has shown that one's own body movements influence how easily one can track the movements other people make. This implicates a process of mapping self-initiated to other-initiated action. Such a mapping, Dr. Reed argues, is an essential component of understanding and interpreting others' actions. This has led her to investigate not only the functions of embodiment at a behavioral level but the mechanisms that underlie it at a neuropsychological level. Dr. Reed's methodological approach encompasses behavioral studies with normal and impaired populations and neuro-imaging. |
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Andrew Schwartz is a Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. His early work, in collaboration with Apostolos Georgopoulos, led to an understanding of how three-dimensional arm trajectories are represented in motor cortex. Subsequently his investigations of the cortical basis of movement control have led him to develop cortical prosthetics. In one project, cortical signals generated during monkeys' arm movements were recorded and used to control motorized arm prostheses that allowed the animals to grasp food and bring it to their mouths. Dr. Schwartz's work also makes use of virtual reality to study the transformation of movement from intention to action. |
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Margaret Shiffrar is Professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University. he goal of her research is to understand how the visual system interprets moving objects within the context of a unified understanding of visual system function. Her work examines the relationships between visual physiology and visual perception at multiple levels of analysis. This includes behavioral studies that examine the visual analysis of human movement, implicit memory for objects in motion, and the role of image segmentation cues in motion coherence and visual memory for shape. Although her primary approach is behavioral, Dr. Shiffrar has also made use of fMRI in her research. Dr. Shiffrar's work is particularly noteworthy for uncovering a number of illuminating phenomena involving embodied representations, including regulation of apparent motion, interpretation of point-light displays, and implicit movement during observation. She is currently examining how visual experience, motor experience, and social processes all contribute to the visual analysis of human movement. |
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Peter Strick is a Professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh as well as the co-director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. His important contribution to the symposium is the detailed neural analysis of the circuitry of the central nervous system, particularly the motor system. He has shown, for example, that the frontal lobe contains at least 6 'premotor' areas, each of which projects directly to M1 and to the spinal cord and may contribute to volitional movement and has explored the role of the premotor areas in the recovery of motor function that can occur following damage to M1 or its connections (as in spinal cord injury or strokes). In addition, he has examined the contribution of the basal ganglia and cerebellum, two subcortical centers, to the central control of movement (as well as to other non-motor behaviors). Finally, he is adopting a unique approach to unraveling the interconnections of the central nervous system by using an approach in which transneuronal transport of neurotropic viruses to define an elaborate matrix of interconnections in the central nervous system. His detailed physiological and anatomical studies will set out the neural bases for planning and motor execution. |
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This page last updated: 5-23-06 rk/tc |
