Claudia Carello - US grants

A person, without benefit of seeing, can come to know about certain properties of objects by wielding and shaking them. Similarly, he or she can come to know about certain properties of unseen surfaces by striking them with a hand-held implement. These instances of knowing about the surrounding environment through the use of the body, known as haptic perception, are based on mechanical forces that distort the body's tissues in complex ways. Presumably, for each perceived environmental property, there is a specific mechanical property. Identifying these mechanical properties, and understanding exactly how people use them to measure spatial characteristics of the adjacent environment, pose significant challenges. These experiments will examine how people use the inertia tensor as the mechanical basis for the haptic perception of the lengths, shapes, and orientations of unseen objects wielded by hand, and they will examine how people use the resultant of reactive forces as the mechanical basis for the haptic perception of the distance between struck surfaces. This research will also examine patterns of wielding, looking for a relation between the particular way an object is wielded and the object property the person is attempting to measure. The participants in the experiments will respond by adjusting visible, moveable surfaces to quantify the perceived properties. Results could provide insights valuable in the design of sensory and motor prostheses, robotic limbs, and "smart" remote-sensing instruments.

People are social animals, in part, because they can accomplish things together that they cannot do alone. The possibilities for acting in the environment are very different when others are present. These possibilities for action, the so-called affordances of a situation, are quantitatively and qualitatively changed when we are with another person. Not only can we perform tasks that are more demanding but, as a cooperative social unit, we may see new ways that such tasks can be completed.
With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Kerry Marsh and her colleagues will advance our understanding of how pairs of individuals shift from solo to shared action in physical tasks. Past research suggests that fundamental mathematical principles determine the actions of a solo actor in reaching or lifting for example. Dr. Marsh and colleagues extend those principles to understand interpersonal action. The funded research will investigate how physical limitations and environmental constraints on individuals combine with interpersonal constraints such as past relationship and shared goals to affect cooperative actions among individuals. The current approach makes specific predictions regarding how and when cooperation will emerge. Broader impacts of interpersonal cooperation are of fundamental societal import, and the rigorous method of the funded study is unique and original.

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.

This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Developmental and Learning Sciences Program in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences in the Directorate for Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences, and the Chemical Structure Dynamics and Mechanism Program in the Division of Chemistry in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

All organisms develop the ability to perceive and act in the service of goals and intentions, no matter how rudimentary. Behavioral scientists have traditionally considered perception and action as properties of higher-order animals, but recent work shows that all living things, including single-celled organisms, plants, and fungi, develop the ability to detect information in their environments and use that information to guide action. The diversity of biological systems capable of perception-action suggests that, rather than reflecting a particular biological specialization, perception-action develops through general physical principles that biology has richly exploited. The current project aims to discover these physical principles. The investigators take the theory of dissipative structures from modern thermodynamics as a natural starting place for understanding how perception-action emerges in self-organizing, epistemic systems. Dissipative structures demonstrate the emergence of morphology from the flow of energy and matter. The investigators' recent work shows that more complex dissipative structures detect and move to new energy sources. To do so, these dissipative structures store energy, and release it during time-delayed actions related to their own persistence, thus demonstrating rudimentary perception-action. The project focuses on non-living, physical systems that generate their own morphology and perceiving-acting capabilities. The investigators will: 1) Create a set of physical systems that self-organize their morphology so as to detect information in the environment, and act on that information relative to a goal; 2) Design paradigms in which these systems develop perceiving and acting capabilities that begin to converge on the complex perception-action behaviors of simple organisms, including searching for new energy sources; 3) Use new concepts, such as functional symmetry breaking, to extend the theory of dissipative structures to encompass systems that obey thermodynamic laws locally (i.e., on smaller spatial and temporal scales), but develop the ability to perceive and act in the service of rudimentary goals globally (i.e., on larger spatial and temporal scales). In so doing, the project seeks to provide an overarching theoretical framework for understanding how self-ordering physico-chemical systems come to detect information about their environments and act on that information in the service of maintaining their own structures, in effect, developing rudimentary forms of foraging for energy and matter.

Currently, the goal-directed perception and action of living systems is beyond the explanatory reach of natural law. The project will provide a new starting point for understanding perception-action grounded in thermodynamics. The work will begin with relatively simple, non-organic physical systems, but the implications for the biological and behavioral sciences are considerable. As such, the project should help create a new interdisciplinary field that connects phenomena in biology (in the broadest sense of the term), self-organizing systems, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Ultimately, the results of the project may provide the foundation for a new type of engineering, in which a system self-organizes its perception and action to achieve an imposed goal.