Kello - 0239595 CAREER Award With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Christopher Kello's program of research and education will examine the dynamics of perception, action and cognition. Time is perhaps the oldest and most widely used scale on which to measure human behavior. Response time studies for almost two hundred years have sought to measure the minimum time that the mind and body require to formulate an action. Currently, this relatively passive procedure is used to estimate the timecourse of human thought. By contrast, Dr. Kello has originated a cognitive entrainment paradigm in which participants actively use time to control their behavior. Control over the timing of behavior is achieved when participants match the onset of an action to a specified beat of an audiovisual metronome. For instance, a signal to act might be presented on one beat and the participant must act on the next beat. The tempo of the metronome can be varied to expand or compress the time between the signal and the required action. Changes in behavior sometimes appear as systematic errors at compressed time intervals. These errors reveal the dynamic character of the human mind. In effect, this technique catches participants in the process of "making up their mind" as they formulate an action. The beauty of this new paradigm is its flexibility. One can use this tool to explore the hidden structure of words, or combine one mental task with another to see how they interact, and so on. Some broader impacts of the proposed work are to teach students to use this tool and to make this tool available on the world wide web so that other laboratories may benefit from Dr. Kello's initiative.
