Career: Moving During Deliberation-Online Interplay Between Deciding and Acting

University Of Delaware, Newark DE

Investigators

Abstract

Many human activities, such as walking in a crowded hallway or steering a car to avoid an accident, involve making fast decisions while controlling one's movements. Researchers have extensively (but largely independently) studied human decision making and movement control so that their joint influence remains poorly understood. This CAREER award uses computational modeling, neurophysiological recording, and behavioral methods to address the real-time interplay between the evolving decision-making process and movement control during human reaching. Many neurological disorders such as stroke and Parkinson’s disease involve both motor and cognitive deficits. This research program aims to uncover the mechanisms that underpin the interplay between movement and decision making, paving the way for targeted, patient-specific neurorehabilitation of motor and cognitive deficits. The long-term goal is to create sustainable and reciprocal pipelines between research, education, and community outreach by focusing on the interplay between decision making and movement control. The investigator provides training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. Open-access educational games and interactive programs are developed and made freely available to grade-school and high-school students, with the aim of raising awareness about neurological disorders and inspiring a new generation of STEM scientists and industry leaders. The investigators merge computational models from optimal feedback control and decision sciences to understand how goal-related evidence influences the online control of movement. The subject's movements provide a real-time measure of the evolving decision-making process in order to assess 1) how rapid visuomotor feedback loops integrate and express both goal-related evidence and potential energetic cost and 2) whether reward boosts the need to modulate movement vigor and the efficacy of visuomotor feedback during decision making. This project is jointly funded by The Perception, Action, and Cognition (PAC) Program, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and the Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences (DRMS) Program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.