The Role of Sensorimotor and Perceptual Features in Perceiving and Enacting Actions

提供虚拟培训已成为一种日益重要的培训技能的方法，这些技能在现实世界中是危险的、昂贵的或以其他方式无法进行的(例如军事行动)。一个长期存在的问题是，在模拟训练环境中学到的技能如何才能很好地转化为现实世界的实践。模拟世界在许多方面与真实世界不同。特别是，在感觉、运动和知觉特征上存在显著差异。体验式认知科学的进步一直表明，人类身体和身体所处的环境是如何共同形成一个复杂的系统来产生精神活动的。然而，到目前为止报道的大多数研究只检查了具身认知科学和经典认知科学预测的认知过程中的微小增量差异。很少有研究调查这种递增的差异是否会转化为学习新技能的切实后果。这项研究项目调查的中心假设是，人们在模拟世界和现实世界中感知和实施危险行为和非风险行为的方式是否存在差异。这类研究的主要困难之一是创建简单的并行任务环境，这种环境可以接受受控实验，但可以扩大到现实世界的应用程序。这项研究项目通过选择可能具有内在风险的日常行为来实现这一点，并使用了检查事件感知展开的时间过程的方法。对于感知动作，参与者将执行感知分割任务，记录他们的眼球运动，并回答有关动作记忆的问题。对于制定行动，参与者将表明他们将如何完成行动。本研究的长期实践目标是在以下三个方面为模拟训练环境的开发者提供经验基础：1)确定知觉和感觉信息的适当规格水平；2)确定适当的指令水平，以突出或补偿在模拟世界中实施动作所产生的一些显著差异；以及3)确定通过模拟可以学习哪些动作与应该通过真实世界练习学习哪些动作。这一研究项目汇集了体现认知科学、人工智能、人机交互和机器人学等领域的理论和实证研究的跨学科整合。认知心理学直到最近才开始理解人类如何自发地将不断流动的多通道信息分割成离散的事件，并对正在进行的世界施加认知控制。这项研究项目向根据传入世界的多模式分割来概念化人类和复杂的机器行为迈进了一步。更好的模拟环境设计将产生于这种理解，并将造福于整个社会，在这个社会中，我们越来越多地与技术互动，并在技术驱动的学习环境中接受培训。

Providing virtual training has become an increasingly important method for training skills that are risky, expensive, or otherwise infeasible to carry out in the real world (e.g., military operations). One long standing question has been how well skills learned in a simulated training environment can be transferred to real world practice. The simulated world differs from the real world in a number of aspects. In particular, there are significant differences in sensory, motor, and perceptual features. Advances in embodied cognitive science have consistently demonstrated how the human body, and the environment which the body inhabits, together form a complex system in producing mental activities. However, most studies that have been reported thus far only examined small incremental differences in cognitive processes as predicted by the embodied versus classic cognitive science. There are few studies that have investigated whether the incremental differences will translate into tangible consequences in learning new skills. The central hypothesis being investigated in this research project is whether there are differences in how people perceive and enact risky versus non-risky actions in the simulated versus the real world. One of the major difficulties in such studies is to create simple parallel task environments that are amenable to controlled experimentation but can be scaled up for real world applications. This research project accomplishes this by selecting everyday actions that can be inherently risky and uses methods that examine the time course in which event perception unfolds. For perceiving actions, participants will perform perceptual segmentation tasks, have their eye movements recorded, and answer questions regarding the memory of actions. For enacting actions, participants will indicate how they would complete the actions. The long-term practical objective of this research is to provide an empirical basis for developers of simulated training environments in the following three areas: 1) determining the appropriate level of specifications for perceptual and sensory information; 2) determining the appropriate level of instructions to either highlight or compensate some of the significant differences that result from enacting actions in the simulated world; and, 3) determining what actions can be learned via simulations versus what actions ought to be learned via real world practices. This research project brings together an interdisciplinary integration of theory and empirical research from the fields of embodied cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and robotics. Cognitive psychology has not begun, until recently, to understand how humans spontaneously segment the constant flux of multimodal information into discrete events and exert cognitive control over the ongoing world. This research project goes a step forward towards conceptualizing human and complex machine behaviors in terms of the multimodal segmentations of the incoming world. The better design of simulated environments will result from this understanding and will benefit all of society, in which we are increasingly interacting with technology and being trained in technology driven learning environments.