Crossing a busy street can be challenging. The pedestrian must carefully estimate the time and distance needed to reach safe ground, and compare these with estimates of the speeds and directions of potentially many vehicles as they speed by. The baseball player faces a similar challenge in estimating whether to chase down a fly ball or wait for it to bounce. These challenges illustrate how physical tasks often require one to implicitly and seemlessly take into account one's own perceptual and motor constraints. How do people know with such precision that a given action is or is not within the limits of their perceptual and motor systems, well before the action is initiated? This basic human ability is particularly impressive when one considers that perceptual and motor constraints change throughout life. For instance, maximum running speed may change as a result of training, injury, fatigue, surface traction, and many other factors. People effortlessly adapt to such changes, often without even being aware of them.
With support of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Fajen will investigate how humans perceive and act in ways that reflect their ever-changing visual and motor capabilities. Experiments will be conducted in a virtual environment laboratory so that aspects of the task and environment can be manipulated while participants actively engage in realistic perceptual-motor tasks. The results will further our understanding of the adaptivity of perceptual and motor systems. This knowledge may inform the remediation of visual or motor functions that are impaired due to injury or disease. It may also inform the design of prostheses, simulators, virtual environments and other artifacts that engage the adaptive powers of perceptual and motor systems.
