Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Arıkan K. B. (Yürütücü)
Yükseköğretim Kurumları Destekli Proje, BAP Araştırma Projesi, 2020 - 2022
"We are a social species and we need social interactions. We act and react to those around us as part of our regular social interaction (SI). SI requires synchrony. Synchrony refers to individuals’ time-based coordination during SI. The harmonization of two or more persons' movement patterns happens inherently and in an automatic fashion. However, the governing mechanisms in our brains for social interaction and synchronization seem complex and are not well understood yet. In addition to social interactions, sensorimotor synchronization is compulsory to optimize motor learning and performance. The coordination of our actions in time and space with the actions of others needs prediction. Our brains predict the future for anticipatory movements. Mainly, the cerebellum and basal ganglia collaborate to anticipate timing in daily life. In the case of a rhythmic stimulus, the basal ganglia play a role in the anticipation of the appropriate future stimulus-response dyads. However, when the coordination of the movement relies on past experiences, the cerebellum takes place for prediction. Besides the therapeutic concerns, understanding how we synchronize with others and how we predict their motion is crucial to design social robots that interact with us smoothly. In this study, the mirror game paradigm will be used to study the prediction and synchronization. The mirror game paradigm is played with two players in two different modalities namely the leader-follower (LF) modality and joint improvisation (JI) modality. For the leader-follower condition, there is a certain leader and follower in the game, and the action of the leader is tried to be done by the follower. In contrast, for joint improvisation conditions, there is no designated leader and follower in the game, and the movements are carried out in a coordinated and synchronized manner. The developed setup will provide to make both human-player to human-player games and human-player to virtual-player rounds. Furthermore, a single degree of freedom robotic arm (i.e. a slider-crank mechanism) will interact with the human-player by the aid of a linear spring as he/she plays LF or JI game. This project aims to build the required mechatronic infrastructure to perform the games, collect the position data, and derive the required models and metrics to evaluate the performance of players and the level of prediction during the games. The system will be used to understand the synchronization and prediction as to the basis of SI. Besides, it will serve as a rehabilitative system for cerebellar patients that will focus on motion disorders. Another group of interest will be the subjects with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The haptic interaction will be investigated to enhance the prediction ability of cerebellar patients and ASD subjects. Both of these implementations with control groups and patients are beyond the scope of this project and left for future projects with extended teams and external funding. "