People navigate through cluttered terrain with apparent ease, steering around obstacles to find the least effortful route. Water from the Spring thaw also negotiates cluttered terrain, finding its way down the hillside, around obstacles following the least effortful route. Behavior in the first example is an intentional act guided by information; behavior in the second example emerges from circumstances guided by physical law. While it is easy to consider everyday behavior as the product of special psychological abilities controlled by the brain, fairly complicated behaviors are characteristic of many physical systems that don't have brains to control them. Many scientists believe that human behavior can benefit from being treated as a problem of physics.
The proposed conference aims at bringing a diverse group of scientists to discuss issues related to the interface between psychology and physics with respect to perception, action, and cognition. The conference organizers hope that the meeting will provide a venue where scientists consider what can be learned about human behavior by studying the principles that govern complex physical systems. The conference will bring physicists together with psychologists who study memory, language, perception, and coordinated movement; kinesiologists who study balance, skill, and movement disorders; and physical therapists who study cerebral palsy, stroke, and sensory deficits due to diabetes. It will focus on five research areas: 1) Coordination Dynamics, 2) Haptic Perception, 3) Optics and Acoustics, 4) Language, and 5) Memory. The overall goal is to foster a deeper appreciation of how general the physical perspective can be for human cognition and behavior. The understanding of physical principles that govern fluent human behavior will also have consequences for how we approach the learning of new behaviors and the remediation of behavioral disorders.
