CAREER: Entrainment of Cognitive Dynamics

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，Christopher Kello博士的研究和教育项目将研究感知、行动和认知的动力学。时间可能是衡量人类行为的最古老和最广泛使用的尺度。反应时间的研究已经进行了近两百年，人们一直在试图测量大脑和身体形成一个动作所需的最短时间。目前，这种相对被动的过程被用来估计人类思维的时间进程。相比之下，凯洛博士开创了一种认知夹带范式，在这种范式中，参与者积极地利用时间来控制自己的行为。当参与者将动作的开始与视听节拍器的指定节拍相匹配时，就可以实现对行为时间的控制。例如，一个动作信号可能出现在一个节拍上，参与者必须在下一个节拍上行动。节拍器的速度可以改变，以扩大或压缩时间之间的信号和所需的行动。行为的变化有时表现为在压缩时间间隔内的系统错误。这些错误揭示了人类思维的动态特性。实际上，这项技术捕捉到了参与者在制定行动时“下定决心”的过程。这种新模式的美妙之处在于它的灵活性。人们可以使用这个工具来探索单词的隐藏结构，或者将一个心理任务与另一个心理任务结合起来，看看它们是如何相互作用的，等等。这项工作的一些更广泛的影响是教会学生使用这个工具，并使这个工具可以在万维网上使用，这样其他实验室就可以从Kello博士的倡议中受益。

ABSTRACTKello - 0239595CAREER AwardWith support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Christopher Kello's program of research and education will examine the dynamics of perception, action and cognition. Time is perhaps the oldest and most widely used scale on which to measure human behavior. Response time studies for almost two hundred years have sought to measure the minimum time that the mind and body require to formulate an action. Currently, this relatively passive procedure is used to estimate the timecourse of human thought. By contrast, Dr. Kello has originated a cognitive entrainment paradigm in which participants actively use time to control their behavior. Control over the timing of behavior is achieved when participants match the onset of an action to a specified beat of an audiovisual metronome. For instance, a signal to act might be presented on one beat and the participant must act on the next beat. The tempo of the metronome can be varied to expand or compress the time between the signal and the required action. Changes in behavior sometimes appear as systematic errors at compressed time intervals. These errors reveal the dynamic character of the human mind. In effect, this technique catches participants in the process of "making up their mind" as they formulate an action. The beauty of this new paradigm is its flexibility. One can use this tool to explore the hidden structure of words, or combine one mental task with another to see how they interact, and so on. Some broader impacts of the proposed work are to teach students to use this tool and to make this tool available on the world wide web so that other laboratories may benefit from Dr. Kello's initiative.