Collaborative Research: Emergent motor timing influences perceptual timing

许多现实世界的行为，如敲击音乐节拍、投球或过马路，都依赖于感知、认知和运动动作之间的精确时间。幸运的是，我们的运动系统通常与我们的感知和认知过程无缝配合。尽管它们在现实世界中是如何协同工作的，但这些方面的行为在实验室里主要是单独研究的。虽然这种方法允许科学的严谨性，并对每个子系统提供了重要的见解，但它对它们之间的相互作用几乎没有说明，而相互作用可能是理解人类行为的基础。更好地理解感知、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，认知神经假肢，一种帮助瘫痪患者和截肢患者的新型人机界面。识别认知、知觉和运动功能之间的时间相互作用，对于为运动和知觉时间受损的人群开发新的康复范例具有其他的翻译潜力。该研究计划旨在评估感知和运动控制中的时间是否以及如何涉及确保无缝集成和塑性协同修改的共享机制。实验方法结合了运动技能，在增强现实环境中扔球，以及时间感知任务。目标1探讨了从离散投掷动作中出现的运动定时如何改变感知定时。目标2将这个问题扩展到需要有节奏的投掷动作的情况。目的3研究运动和知觉时间的习得性耦合是否长期存在。总的来说，这种定量的方法来理解感知和运动定时之间的联系，将有助于在现实世界中发展一个统一的定时控制理论。女性研究小组还确定了多种外展活动，以促进和沟通科学研究与STEM教育的整合，并增加少数民族在认知、感知和运动科学中的代表性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识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.