Hand Shaping: A Paradigm for Cognitive/Motoric Interaction.

摘要

The research efforts during the contract period resulted in three submitted or published papers and one doctoral dissertation. The papers reported: (i) a series of experiments demonstrating that activation of a hand-shape representation could facilitate subsequent judgements about actions on objects; (ii) an investigation of preshaping during responses to objects; and (iii) the development of a controlled object-display system to measure response time and movement time. The dissertation reported a series of experiments demonstrating that priming of a hand shape was disrupted by simultaneous preparation for a sequence of finger responses but not by preparation for a sequence of spoken syllables. In general, our results suggest a cognitive/motoric representation of the hand with which actions on objects can be internally modeled, and which may serve a preparatory role in performance.