Multisensory coding of body and space

想象一下，你开着一辆车，一边用一只手抓着方向盘，一边不小心地弯下身子从手套箱里拿东西。在这个动作中，你的眼睛、头部和身体相对于彼此的位置改变，偏离了你直立坐着、直视前方时的对齐位置。这是一件危险的事情，因为你对物体的相对位置和你在道路上的位置的感知会被这个不寻常的姿势改变。这项提议的目标是开发一个全面的模型，说明有关身体安排的信息如何影响知觉判断。我将提出三个主题：(1)身体对感知定向的贡献。关于我们如何知道自己相对于世界的方位，有三条主要线索：视觉线索(例如，天空和地面的方向)、重力方向(由内耳感知)和身体方位的内部表示。“身体”实际上由几个部分组成--眼睛、头、脖子、躯干、四肢和骨盆区域--在解剖学的限制下，这些部分相对于彼此是灵活的。我预计这些部分的安排会影响人们对方位的感知。(2)身体定位。我最近的工作发现，在定位手臂上与眼睛位置相关的触摸时存在错误。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现进行编码的。我预计在定位背部和面部的触摸(通常看不到)时会发现类似的错误，但由于我们习惯使用镜子，这些错误可能会颠倒过来。(3)运动体。触摸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以视觉方式存储，因此容易受到与眼睛位置有关的错误的影响？我的研究项目认识到身体是认知的基础。了解身体是如何编码的，以及它是如何影响感知的位置和方向的，这不仅对于理解大脑是如何工作的，而且对于整合了来自多个渠道的信息的工作空间的设计也是至关重要的，例如在开车时。

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.