Taking the measure of the factors which influence the assignment of agency during online motor control
Tez Türü: Yüksek Lisans
Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: University College London, INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE, COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE, İngiltere
Tez Danışmanı: Prof Joern Dıedrıchsen
Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2012
Tezin Dili: İngilizce
Özet:
Agency assignment is the ability of the motor system to determine which effector(s) and which sensory information is matched to the appropriate state estimate. How the visuo-motor system determines the match of relevant visual information to the appropriate state estimate is still not known. In the current study, in order to investigate the mechanism that underlies the agency assignment, we examined the factors which may have an influence on the assignment of agency by conducting three bimanual reaching experiments. In the experiments, by using robotic arms, participants were instructed to make quick bimanual reaching movements to a target while a single visual cursor is displayed. By displacing the cursor and examining the corrective movements issued by each hand, the degree of agency over the cursor by each hand was measured. By using force channel trials, we had the opportunity to quantitatively measure the force applied by the hands to correct the movement. In the experiment 1 where the cursor and the target was aligned more to the left or more to the right with respect to the midpoint, we investigated the influence of spatial proximity of the cursor to the actual position of the hands on agency assignment. In the experiment 2 where either left hand or right hand controlled the movement of the cursor, we examined the influence of spatial-temporal relation of the two hands with the cursor on agency assignment. In the experiment 3, two distractor circles that had full spatial temporal correlation with the actual movements were displayed in order to see whether spatial temporal correlation between visual cursor objects and hands is sufficient for assigning agency. The findings of the experiment 1 and 2 showed that the spatial proximity of the cursor to the actual position of the hands, and the spatial-temporal correlation of the hands with the cursor influence the assignment of agency. However, the results of the experiment 3 demonstrated nicely that the full spatial temporal correlation is not sufficient for assignment of agency.