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Language Action Perception Dynamics Laboratory |
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When participants are instructed to click an object on the computer
screen, the continuous trajectory of the mouse (green circles) exhibits
attraction effects from objects with similar names (i.e., the candle). These continuous attraction effects
share much in common with a dynamical system settling into one or another of
its attractor basins (shown underneath). See Spivey, Grosjean, & Knoblich
(2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Rather than conducting forensic analyses of substances on murder weapons and other paraphernalia, this L.A.P.D. Lab conducts experimental analyses of the temporal dynamics of language, action, and perception. Most of the natural input to our perceptual systems (not the input typically concocted in most experimental psychology laboratories) is crucially time-dependent. That is, in every-day life, we do not get exposed to an isolated stimulus at time t, then another isolated stimulus at time t+1, etc. Rather, we get exposed to sequences of environmental instances: Extremely rich arrays of input, in both the linguistic and visual domains (other domains too, of course), that require accumulation and integration of the signals over time in order to arrive at coherent intermediate representations that could map onto feasible motor responses. Supported by a range of experimental findings and computational demonstrations, our account of real-time information integration suggests that this time-dependent process requires multiple intermediate representations to be partially active (and therefore multiple feasible motor responses to be partially prepared) in order for temporary uncertainties in any one sensory signal to be intelligently resolved by certainties in other sensory signals. Supported by NIH grant R01 MH63961 |
