Colloquium Cognitive Systems

Visual interactions with motor control

Prof. Loes van Dam, Ph.D (Technical University of Darmstadt)

Abstract. When we move our own body parts, for instance our hand and arm, we receive information from several senses at once. That is, besides information from having planned a movement we receive feedback concerning that movement from our receptors in the muscles and skin. Moreover, when looking at our hand at the same time we also receive visual information about the position and movement of the hand. In this presentation, I will present a series of studies that look at how visual information affects the execution/perception of our own limb movements. We for instance compared the role of visual reliability for position estimates for cursor objects that are controlled by the participant and target objects that they track but do not control. Results consistently show that changing the visual reliability of the position affects visual estimation for the target but not the cursor in otherwise visually similar conditions. We furthermore compared conditions in
which participants performed a task on a 2D screen with similar tasks in Virtual Reality which can present the limb movements in a more direct way. The latter environment opens up future opportunities to investigate potential interactions between the perception of our own movements with body perception more generally.

Bio. Prof Loes van Dam obtained her MSc degree in Physics at Utrecht University, the Netherlands (2002) and continued to obtain her PhD there in 2006. After working as a Postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany and Bielefeld University, Germany she became a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer at the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex in the UK. In 2021 she moved back to Germany to take up a position as a full Professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt.