It is difficult to simultaneously convey the subtle forces and motions of a task to another person when teaching a physical skill. A common technique is for the expert to move the novice through the task. But this guiding motion is only partially effective at portraying the full experience because the novice only performs the task passively. To fully experience the physical interaction, an active recreation of the actions would be much more effective. The PI's goal in this research is to enable a person to recreate the actions performed by another person while fully experiencing the forces that result from those actions. To this end, the PI will explore a bimanual approach that takes advantage of our inherent ability to synchronize motions between both sides of our bodies, to allow a person to independently generate a desired path while feeling the task-related forces actively. Note how easy it is to simultaneously draw a pair of identical circles (or other shape) with both hands. Based on this observation, and in contrast to training methods that guide the dominant hand, the PI's method will guide the non-dominant hand and ask the individual to recreate the motions in the dominant hand, which will receive all the forces involved in the interaction. In this way, one arm will both receive forces while actively generating motions and will fully experience the task forces. Prior to implementing and testing this bimanual guidance method, several experiments will be conducted to determine the involved sensorimotor control parameters; specifically, hypotheses will be tested to evaluate our abilities to recreate a motion that is applied to one hand and to evaluate whether people can be taught to perceive passively applied forces similarly to actively applied forces. In contrast to methods that aim to make the physical interaction with an environment as realistic as possible, this method is transformative in that it aims to make the perception of the physical interaction as similar as possible to another person's actions by incorporating the human's sensorimotor control system. The scientific challenge lies in determining how the two modalities (force from one side and position from the other) are integrated and in determining and overcoming the sensorimotor delays associated with perception and recreating the force.
Broader Impacts: This research will fundamentally advance our understanding of force perception, bimanual interactions, and how forces and motions are cognitively integrated to perceive objects in active and passive tasks. The work will enable one person to fully experience the same physical interaction as another person, which will transform teaching and training techniques for surgeons, athletes, and helicopter and airplane pilots, among others. In addition to directly supporting a graduate and an undergraduate student, this research will also impact engineering students in the PI's class on haptics who will learn about performing psychophysical experiments on humans.
