Multisensory coding of body and space

想象一下，你正在开车，一只手握着方向盘，不小心弯下腰去从手套箱里拿东西。在这个动作中，你的眼睛，头部和身体改变了彼此的相对位置，偏离了你坐直并直视前方时的对齐位置。这是一件危险的事情，因为你对物体相对位置的感知和你在路上的位置都会被这种不寻常的姿势改变。这个建议的目标是开发一个全面的模型，了解身体的排列信息如何影响感知判断。我将展开三个主题：（1）身体对感知方向的贡献。有三个主要的线索，我们如何知道我们的方向相对于世界：视觉线索（例如，天空和地面的方向）、重力的方向（由内耳感知）以及身体方位的内部表征。事实上，“身体”包括几个组成部分-眼睛、头、颈、躯干、四肢和骨盆区域-这些部分在解剖学的限制下相对于彼此是灵活的。我希望这些组件的排列会影响方向的感知。(2)尸体上的定位。我最近的研究发现，在定位手臂上的触摸时，与眼睛位置有关。令人惊讶的是，这些错误表明，触摸是相对于身体表面的视觉表示进行编码的。我希望在定位背部和面部的触摸时也能发现类似的错误（这通常是看不到的），但由于我们习惯使用镜子，这些错误可能会被逆转。 (3)移动的身体。触觉的一个重要功能是用积极的探索来解释世界。通过主动探索获得的信息是否也是视觉存储的，因此容易受到眼睛位置相关错误的影响？我的研究项目认为身体是认知的基础。了解身体是如何编码的，以及它如何影响感知的位置和方向，不仅对了解大脑如何工作至关重要，而且对设计集成多个通道信息的智能驾驶系统也至关重要，例如在驾驶汽车时。

Imagine you are driving a car and ill-advisedly lean over to get something out of the glove box all the while holding on to the steering wheel with one hand. During this maneuver your eyes, head and body change their positions relative to each other and deviate from the aligned positions that they have while you are sitting upright and looking straight ahead. This is a dangerous thing to do because your perception of the relative positions of objects and your position on the road is altered by this unusual posture. The goal of this proposal is to develop a comprehensive model of how information about the arrangement of the body affects perceptual judgements. I will develop three themes: (1) THE BODY'S CONTRIBUTION TO PERCEIVED ORIENTATION. There are three main cues to how we know our orientation relative to the world: visual cues (e.g., the direction of the sky and ground), the direction of gravity (sensed by the inner ear) and the internal representation of the orientation of the body. The "body" in fact comprises several components - the eyes, head, neck, torso, limbs and pelvic regions -- that are flexible relative to each other within anatomical constraints. I expect the arrangement of these components to influence the perception of orientation. (2) LOCALIZATION ON THE BODY. My recent work has found errors in localizing a touch on the arm that are related to eye position. These errors suggest, surprisingly, that touch is coded relative to a visual representation of the body surface. I expect to find similar errors in localizing touches on the back and face (which cannot normally be seen) but which might be reversed because of our customary use of mirrors. (3) THE MOVING BODY. An important function of touch is to interpret the world using active exploration. Is the information obtained by active exploration also stored visually and hence vulnerable to eye-position related errors? My research program recognizes the body as fundamental to cognition. Knowing how the body is coded and how it affects perceived location and orientation is critical not only to understand how the brain works but also for the design of workspaces where information from multiple channels is integrated, for example when driving a car.