Project Details
Projekt
Simultaneous learning of multiple sensorimotor transformations
Applicant
Professor Dr. Mathias Hegele
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Term
from 2015 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 274922074
Technological advances continuously lead to the development of modern tools that pose new demands on the sensorimotor capabilities of humans in work settings as well as in public and private spaces. Of particular interest, at least from a perspective of sensorimotor learning, is a novel class of movements that are characterized by the spatial separation and mechanical decoupling of movement execution and observation. These movements are typically found in the use of electronic tools. A prototypical exemplar is the computer mouse. With this tool, an electronic device mediates the transformation of hand movements into motions of the cursor on the computer monitor. In everyday life, humans encounter a wide variety of such electronic tools, whose characteristics strongly differ and most of the time, must be learned from scratch in the course of deliberate practice. Once learned, humans effortlessly switch between various tool transformations, for example, in driving a car, when the experienced driver is able to instantaneously switch from engaging a gear in the horizontal plane to turning the steering wheel in the frontoparallel plane. Thus, the use of modern tools requires an adaptive system that is highly flexible and able to represent multiple tool transformations at the same time. In the present project, I seek to understand how humans can learn multiple tool transformations at the same time. To this end, I investigate explicit and implicit components of human multilearning. In four work packages, I seek to understand (a) how the processing of different kinds of performance errors by the central nervous system drives explicit and implicit learning, (b) the role of the cerebellum, which has traditionally been associated with implicit learning, for explicit, strategy-driven learning, (c) if and how additional cognitive tasks affect explicit and implicit components of learning multiple transformations at the same time, and finally, (d) if it is possible to identify common principles of information processing in human multilearning, with which we can bridge the gap between cognitive psychology and movement science in order to contribute to the overarching goal of the project, the formulation of a novel, more comprehensive theory of human multitasking (in my project: human multilearning).
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
