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Summary
This presentation examines, in a first step, the cognitive architecture of human action, showing how it is organized over several levels and how it is built up. Basic Action Concepts (BACs) are identified as the major building blocks on the level of mental representations. These BACs are cognitive tools for mastering the functional demands of movement tasks. New experimental methods are introduced and applied in studies addressing the functional link between representation structures and human performance in dance, tennis, golf, windsurfing, BMX-bicycle and other kinds of sport and arts. Results of these studies support the hypothesis that voluntary movements are planned, executed, and stored in memory directly through representations of their anticipated perceptual effects (Schack, 2004; Schack & Mechsner, 2006; Bläsing, Puttke & Schack, 2010). In a second step it was our interest to measure such structures in memory and brain and use the results for developing new tools in mental training. The main problem of many traditional procedures is that they try to optimize the performance through repeated imagination of the movement without taking the athlete's mental technique representation into account (i.e., they are representation-blind). The alternative developed here is to measure the mental representation of the movement before mental training and then integrate these results into the training. This Mental Training Based on Mental Representations (MTMR) has now been applied successfully for several years in professional sports (Schack & Hackfort, 2007). In a last step, the presentation deals with functional links between cognitive psychology, movement science and robotics. I will provide an insight into the implementation of motor control research into technical platforms (e.g. robots). A special area of our research is designed to study how the development of structured representation (action templates) occurs in human skill acquisition and how it can be applied in robotics. We translate our findings in studies of human movement into sufficiently specific models that permit an implementation on different robotic systems. This research-connection will be used in both directions: insights gained from the attempt to validate the hypothesis about action and representation structures in the robot learning scenario will be used to inform the design of experiments with human subjects. The insights gained in these experiments are implemented in different robotic platforms (i.e. humanoid robots or a 7 DOF robot arm set-up) and are of interest to understand building blocks of human performance (Schack & Ritter, 2009).
Bläsing, B., Puttke, M. & Schack, T. (Eds) (2010). Neurocognition of dance. Psychology Press: London.
Schack, T. (2004). The Cognitive Architecture of Complex Movement. International Journal of Sport and Exercise psychology, 2(4), 403-438.
Schack, T. & Mechsner, F. (2006). Representation of motor skills in human long-term-memory. Neuroscience Letters ,391, 77-81.
Schack, T. & Hackfort, D. (2007). An action theory approach to applied sport psychology. In G. Tenenbaum & R. C. Eklund (Eds.), Handbook of Sport Psychology (3rd Edition) (pp. 332-351). NJ: Wiley.
Schack, T. & Ritter, H. (2009). The Cognitive Nature of Action – Functional Links between Cognitive Psychology, Movement Science and Robotics. Progress in Brain research: Mind and Motion - The Bidirectional Link between Thought and Action. (pp 231-252). Elsevier.
Resume
Thomas Schack, is in the Neurocognition and Action – Research Group at the Faculty of Psychology and Sport Sciences, Center of Excellence “Cognitive Interaction Technology” (CITEC), Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR-Lab), Bielefeld University, Germany. |
