Collaborative Research: Emergent motor timing influences perceptual timing

许多现实世界中的行为，如随着音乐节拍敲击、投球或过马路，都依赖于感知、认知和运动动作之间的精确计时。幸运的是，我们的运动系统通常与我们的知觉和认知过程协调一致地运行。尽管它们在现实世界中是如何协同工作的，但这些行为的这些方面在很大程度上是在实验室单独研究的。虽然这种方法允许科学上的严谨性，并提供了对每个子系统的重要见解，但它对它们之间的相互作用几乎没有提及，这可能是理解人类行为的基础。更好地了解感知、认知和运动行为的时间方面是如何相互关联的，也有可能推动技术创新，例如认知神经假体，一种帮助瘫痪患者和截肢患者的新型人机接口。识别认知、知觉和运动功能之间的时间交互作用对于为运动和知觉计时受损人群开发新的康复范例具有其他潜在的翻译意义。这项研究计划旨在评估感知和运动控制中的计时是否以及如何涉及共享机制，以确保无缝整合和塑料共同修饰。实验方法结合了运动技能，在增强现实环境中投球，以及时间感知任务。目标1探索从离散投掷动作中产生的运动计时如何改变知觉计时。目标2将这个问题扩展到需要有节奏的投掷动作的情况。目标3考察习得的运动和知觉时序的耦合是否会长期存在。总而言之，这种理解知觉和运动计时之间联系的量化方法将有助于在现实世界中发展一个统一的计时控制理论。女性研究团队还确定了多项外展活动，以促进和交流科学研究与STEM教育的整合，并增加少数群体在认知科学、知觉科学和运动学中的代表性。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Many real-world behaviors, such as tapping to a musical beat, throwing a ball, or crossing the street, depend on precise timing among perception, cognition, and motor action. Luckily, our motor systems usually operate seamlessly in concert with our perceptual and cognitive processes. Despite how they work together in the real world, these aspects of behavior have been largely studied separately in the laboratory. While that approach allows scientific rigor and has provided significant insights into each subsystem, it says little about their interaction, which may be fundamental to understanding human behavior. A better understanding of how the temporal aspects of perceptual, cognitive, and motor behaviors are interrelated also has the potential to advance technological innovations, e.g., in cognitive neural prosthetics, a novel human-computer interface for helping paralyzed patients and patients with amputations. Identifying the temporal interactions among cognitive, perceptual, and motor functions has other translational potential for developing new rehabilitation paradigms for populations with impaired motor and perceptual timing. This research program aims to evaluate whether and how timing in perception and motor control involves shared mechanisms that ensure seamless integration and plastic co-modification. The experimental approach combines a motor skill, throwing a ball in an augmented reality environment, with a time perception task. Objective 1 explores how motor timing that emerges from discrete throwing actions modifies perceptual timing. Objective 2 extends this question to situations requiring rhythmic throwing actions. Objective 3 examines whether learned coupling of motor and perceptual timing persists in the longer term. Taken together, this quantitative approach to understanding the connections between perceptual and motor timing will contribute to developing a unified theory of timing control in real-world contexts. The female investigator team has also identified multiple outreach activities to foster and communicate the integration of scientific research and STEM education and to increase minority representation in the cognitive, perceptual, and motor sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.