The intricacies of human hand movements: Studying the links between perception, action, and cognition
Constanze Hesse

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Date: Wednesday, 18.01.23 15:20 CET

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Abstract:

Very generally, most of my research is focussed on understanding the complex ways in which perceptual and cognitive factors affect human actions. To this end, I use a wide range of different behavioural tasks involving human hand movements (such as grasping, pointing, posting, obstacle avoidance, and tactile exploration tasks). In this talk, I will present three recent lines of investigations from my lab that use different tasks and theoretical approaches to study those interactions. The first set of studies investigates how changes in cognitive resources and interindividual differences in control capacity (e.g., decline due to aging vs. increase due to training/expertise) affect visuomotor control in a bimanual coordination task. In the second study, we aimed to investigate how the links between perception, action, and cognition affect obstacle avoidance behaviour in virtual as compared to natural environments. Specifically, we showed that motor behaviour in an obstacle avoidance task differs between virtual and real environments even when we accounted for perceptual limitations of VR-devices. I will argue that those differences can be attributed to the lack of action consequences in virtual settings (i.e., knowing that things are not real). Finally, I’d like to present a study in which we employed a crossmodal matching task to study the interactions between visual and tactile modalities in texture perception. I will show that the predictions we make about tactile material properties are strongly influenced by visual factors, i.e., illumination.