SBE-UKRI: Integrating vision and action through selection history

大多数真实世界的视觉场景都是复杂和拥挤的，其中多个对象竞争注意力和目标导向的动作。例如，在日常生活中，一个人很容易从包含多种水果的杂货店陈列中拿起一个红苹果。与这种复杂环境的成功互动需要多个机制之间的无缝协调。特别是，帮助我们理解世界的注意力选择机制与作为行动选择基础的机制协同工作，使我们能够产生适应性运动。这种注意力-行动的协同作用是所有复杂行为的根源。对象选择不仅受到知觉突显(自下而上)和当前目标(自上而下)的既定因素的指导，而且还受到选择历史的指导。然而，在现实世界的场景中，选择历史如何链接到视觉引导的动作一直没有得到充分的研究。为了克服这一差距，这一建议的目标是确定控制注意选择和动作选择的机制之间的相互作用，特别是当最近的选择历史偏向于随后的行为时。建议的项目将集中在动作选择的三个未被研究的方面：动作执行的变化、效应器和生物力学成本，以确定它们与丰富的知觉特征选择历史研究的新关系。为了确保成功的结果，将在两个研究团队之间建立一个国际合作，他们将发挥互补和协同的作用：布朗大学(US-PI)的宋博士-注意力和运动控制专家-将在人体上进行心理物理实验，包括对目标定向动作的连续跟踪和力场操纵。为了将经验证据转化为可测试的模型，伯明翰大学(UOB)(英国-PI)的计算建模专家海因克博士将为机器人手臂(机器人模型)开发和实现具有生物学合理性的控制架构。这一共同努力将促进我们对注意力和行动驱动机制之间相互依赖的理解，最终解释适应性的、现实世界的选择行为。

Most real-world visual scenes are complex and crowded, where multiple objects compete for attention and goal-directed action. In daily life, for example, a person easily picks up a red apple from a grocery display containing many kinds of fruit. Successful interactions with such complex environments require seamless coordination among multiple mechanisms. In particular, mechanisms of attentional selection that help us make sense of the world work in unity with those that underlie action selection, allowing us to generate adaptive movements. This attention-action synergy is at the root of all complex behaviour. Object selection is guided not only by the well-established factors of perceptual salience (bottom-up) and current goals (top-down), but also selection history. Yet, how selection history links to visually-guided actions has been understudied in real-world scenarios. To overcome this gap, the goal of this proposal is to determine the interplay between mechanisms controlling attentional selection and action selection, particularly when recent selection history biases subsequent behaviour. The proposed project will focus on three understudied aspects of action selection: variation in action execution, effectors, and biomechanical costs, to determine their novel relations with the wealth of research on selection history of perceptual features. To ensure successful outcomes, an international collaboration between the two research teams, who will play complementary and synergistic roles, will be formed: Dr Song at Brown University (US-PI) - an expert in attention and motor control - will carry out psychophysical experiments in humans including continuous tracking and force field manipulation of goal-directed actions. To translate empirical evidence to testable models, Dr Heinke at University of Birmingham (UoB) (UK-PI) - a computational modelling expert - will develop and implement biologically plausible control architectures for a robot arm (robotics models). This joint endeavour will advance our understanding of the interdependence between attention and action-driven mechanisms to eventually explain adaptive, real-world selection behaviour.