Visual Space and the Visual Guidance of Locomotion

穿过一条繁忙的街道可能是一件具有挑战性的事情。行人必须仔细估计到达安全地面所需的时间和距离，并将这些时间和距离与许多潜在车辆在超速行驶时的速度和方向估计值进行比较。这位棒球运动员在判断是追逐一个飞球还是等待它反弹时面临着类似的挑战。这些挑战表明，体力任务往往需要一个人含蓄地和似乎无关紧要地考虑到自己的知觉和运动限制。在行动开始之前，人们怎么能如此精确地知道某个行动是否在他们的知觉和运动系统的限制之内？当人们考虑到知觉和运动的限制在一生中都在变化时，这种基本的人类能力尤其令人印象深刻。例如，最大跑步速度可能会因训练、受伤、疲劳、表面牵引和许多其他因素而改变。人们毫不费力地适应这样的变化，通常甚至在没有意识到的情况下。在国家科学基金会的支持下，法恩博士将研究人类是如何感知和行动的，这些方式反映了他们不断变化的视觉和运动能力。实验将在虚拟环境实验室中进行，以便在参与者积极参与现实的知觉-运动任务时，可以操纵任务和环境的各个方面。这一结果将进一步加深我们对知觉和运动系统适应性的理解。这一知识可能有助于修复因受伤或疾病而受损的视觉或运动功能。它还可以为假肢、模拟器、虚拟环境和其他利用感知和运动系统的自适应能力的人工制品的设计提供信息。

Crossing a busy street can be challenging. The pedestrian must carefully estimate the time and distance needed to reach safe ground, and compare these with estimates of the speeds and directions of potentially many vehicles as they speed by. The baseball player faces a similar challenge in estimating whether to chase down a fly ball or wait for it to bounce. These challenges illustrate how physical tasks often require one to implicitly and seemlessly take into account one's own perceptual and motor constraints. How do people know with such precision that a given action is or is not within the limits of their perceptual and motor systems, well before the action is initiated? This basic human ability is particularly impressive when one considers that perceptual and motor constraints change throughout life. For instance, maximum running speed may change as a result of training, injury, fatigue, surface traction, and many other factors. People effortlessly adapt to such changes, often without even being aware of them.With support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Fajen will investigate how humans perceive and act in ways that reflect their ever-changing visual and motor capabilities. Experiments will be conducted in a virtual environment laboratory so that aspects of the task and environment can be manipulated while participants actively engage in realistic perceptual-motor tasks. The results will further our understanding of the adaptivity of perceptual and motor systems. This knowledge may inform the remediation of visual or motor functions that are impaired due to injury or disease. It may also inform the design of prostheses, simulators, virtual environments and other artifacts that engage the adaptive powers of perceptual and motor systems.