Forschergruppe
Auge

Sensori-motor decision-making and optimality in goal-directed movements under risk

Dr. Julia Trommershäuser

This project is aimed at gaining insight into the questions, in what sense movement strategies are optimized to serve the demands of a particular task, whether the integration of visual and non-visual information during the planning and execution of goal-directed movements follows principles of optimality, and how eye and hand movements are coordinated during the execution of goal-directed hand movements under risk.

We study human movement planning in environments where we provide explicit feedback on the outcome of actions and compare human performance to a model of optimal performance based on statistical decision theory. The model will allow comparison of optimal and actual sensori-motor behavior in experiments in visuo-haptic environments in which (a) different actions lead to different (monetary) consequences for the movement planner and (b) sources of available visual and proprioceptive information vary between experimental conditions. In addition, eye and hand movements will be monitored simultaneously during these tasks to test for optimality and task-dependency of eye-hand coordination and for the possibility of a decoupling of eye and hand movements.