Environmental Interactions

Cueing in balance and locomotion

Our ability to adopt or maintain balance and locomotion is an essential aspect of human movement behavior. This is in as much true for the posture of a small finger joint, as it is for whole-body balance and walking. An inability to maintain balance and locomotion, in turn, can have significant bearing on motor performance, mobility and thus on quality of life.

• Cueing in Parkinson’s disease
  We address effects of augmented visual feedback on postural control to investigate the direct effects of this feedback on postural control and its potential benefits for balance control in patients with Parkinson’s disease.
• The Interactive Walkway
  The Interactive Walkway: Presentation of augmented-reality objects is controlled in a movement-dependent manner using real-time processing of data derived from multiple spatially and temporally integrated sensors.

Psychological factors

Human actors are always, by definition, in some psychological state. For example, we can experience an emotion; we can perform mental activity; we can try to divide our attention between two tasks; we are in a certain state of consciousness, etc. Coordinated movements are deeply interlinked with such ever-changing psychological states. A complete understanding of coordination must involve understanding of how it is embedded in the human mind.

• Embodied cognition and motor control
  One of the tenets of the embodied cognition theory is that mental states are grounded in the physical body, which can manifest itself as reciprocity between mental states and bodily states.
• Arousal & Balance
  Emotion influences parameters of goal-directed whole-body movements in several ways. Approaching (moving toward) pleasant stimuli is easier compared to approaching unpleasant stimuli. However, when emotional pictures are viewed for a longer time, approaching unpleasant stimuli may in fact be facilitated.