BI 188 Jolande Fooken: Coordinating Action and Perception
May 27, 2024
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Jolande Fooken, a post-postdoctoral researcher, discusses hand-eye coordination and naturalistic tasks. Topics include various eye movements, levels of expertise, Yarbus' work, experimental paradigms for the brain, evolving views about the brain, and the intersection of coordination, robots, and AI.
Naturalistic tasks require complex hand-eye coordination involving various strategies and movements.
Experience influences eye movement strategies, impacting the ability to intercept targets effectively.
Integrating behavioral actions with neural control is crucial for understanding eye movements during complex tasks.
Deep dives
Hand-Eye Coordination in Naturalistic Tasks
Naturalistic tasks, such as making meals for children, involve complex hand-eye coordination. The podcast discusses how different types of eye and hand movements play a role in these tasks, highlighting the various strategies humans use to accomplish them. Despite the challenges in studying hand-eye coordination, understanding these processes remains a key focus in brain sciences as it involves coordinating multiple processes simultaneously.
Eye Movement Research and Naturalistic Behavior
The episode explores the transition from studying simple eye movements to observing eye movements in naturalistic behaviors. Yolanda's work involves analyzing eye movements in humans engaging in natural tasks, like manual interception or hitting a virtual target on a screen. By observing how individuals perform these tasks, Yolanda sheds light on how eye movements and hand actions are coordinated during naturalistic behaviors.
Impact of Experience on Eye Movement Strategies
The podcast delves into how the level of experience influences eye movement strategies, using baseball players as an example. Older players tend to track moving objects longer and more accurately, allowing them to intercept targets effectively, while younger players may rely more on immediate feedback. Yolanda's study on interception tasks among players highlights the role of experience in shaping eye movement strategies.
Bridging Behavioral Actions with Neural Control
Yolanda discusses the importance of bridging behavioral actions with neural control in understanding complex actions like eye movements during tasks. By studying how behavior and neural activity intersect during tasks like interception or hitting targets, researchers can gain insights into the coordination between visual perception, motor control, and cognitive processes. The podcast emphasizes the need to integrate behavioral observations with neural studies for a comprehensive understanding of human actions.
Flow State and Cognitive Processes
The podcast delves into the concept of flow state, where individuals engage in challenging tasks they are skilled at, leading to a state of effortless action and enjoyment. The discussion contrasts flow state with choking under pressure, where individuals become overly aware of their actions. Examples from sports and academics highlight the difference between flow and choking, emphasizing the importance of being at the edge of one's abilities for optimal performance.
Research Approaches in Robotics and AI
The conversation shifts towards applying principles of eye movement dynamics in designing robotic systems, focusing on continuous action-perception loops. The discussion contemplates the use of information-seeking strategies and real-time sensory inputs to enhance robotic functionalities. Critiques of traditional robotic design paradigms and insights from natural systems, like predator vision, inform considerations for modeling robotic behavior after specialized functionalities observed in biological organisms.
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Jolande Fooken is a post-postdoctoral researcher interested in how we move our eyes and move our hands together to accomplish naturalistic tasks. Hand-eye coordination is one of those things that sounds simple and we do it all the time to make meals for our children day in, and day out, and day in, and day out. But it becomes way less seemingly simple as soon as you learn how we make various kinds of eye movements, and how we make various kinds of hand movements, and use various strategies to do repeated tasks. And like everything in the brain sciences, it's something we don't have a perfect story for yet. So, Jolande and I discuss her work, and thoughts, and ideas around those and related topics.