CAREER: Entrainment of Cognitive Dynamics

在国家科学基金会的支持下，克里斯托弗·凯洛博士的研究和教育计划将研究感知、行动和认知的动态。时间可能是衡量人类行为的最古老、使用最广泛的尺度。近两百年来的反应时间研究一直试图测量大脑和身体制定一个行动所需的最短时间。目前，这一相对被动的程序被用来估计人类思维的时间进程。相比之下，科洛博士开创了一种认知纠缠范式，让参与者积极利用时间来控制自己的行为。当参与者将动作的开始与视听节拍器的指定节拍相匹配时，就实现了对行为时间的控制。例如，行动的信号可能出现在一个节拍上，而参与者必须在下一个节拍上采取行动。节拍器的节奏可以改变，以扩大或压缩信号和所需动作之间的时间。行为的改变有时表现为压缩时间间隔的系统误差。这些错误揭示了人类思维的动态特征。实际上，这项技术在参与者制定行动的过程中抓住了他们“下定决心”的机会。这一新模式的美妙之处在于其灵活性。人们可以使用这个工具来探索单词的隐藏结构，或者将一个心理任务与另一个心理任务结合起来，看看它们是如何相互作用的，等等。拟议工作的一些更广泛的影响是教学生使用这个工具，并在万维网上提供这个工具，以便其他实验室可以从Kello博士的倡议中受益。

ABSTRACTKello - 0239595CAREER AwardWith support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Christopher Kello's program of research and education will examine the dynamics of perception, action and cognition. Time is perhaps the oldest and most widely used scale on which to measure human behavior. Response time studies for almost two hundred years have sought to measure the minimum time that the mind and body require to formulate an action. Currently, this relatively passive procedure is used to estimate the timecourse of human thought. By contrast, Dr. Kello has originated a cognitive entrainment paradigm in which participants actively use time to control their behavior. Control over the timing of behavior is achieved when participants match the onset of an action to a specified beat of an audiovisual metronome. For instance, a signal to act might be presented on one beat and the participant must act on the next beat. The tempo of the metronome can be varied to expand or compress the time between the signal and the required action. Changes in behavior sometimes appear as systematic errors at compressed time intervals. These errors reveal the dynamic character of the human mind. In effect, this technique catches participants in the process of "making up their mind" as they formulate an action. The beauty of this new paradigm is its flexibility. One can use this tool to explore the hidden structure of words, or combine one mental task with another to see how they interact, and so on. Some broader impacts of the proposed work are to teach students to use this tool and to make this tool available on the world wide web so that other laboratories may benefit from Dr. Kello's initiative.