The BOUNCING project (2002 – 2009 )

Acronym: BOUNCING
Name: The dynamics of learning new perception-action attractors in ball bouncing
Type: Collaborative project
Funding: US National Science Foundation – European Network Enactive Interfaces – Univ. Paris Sud 11 - University of Montpellier-1
UM1 key researcher: Benoît Bardy
Collaborators: Isabelle Siegler (Univ. Paris Sud 11), Antoine Morice (University of the Mediterranean), Bill Warren (Brown Univ., USA), Dagmar Sternad (Penn State Univ., USA)

BOUNCING is a theoretical and experimental project aiming at discovering perception-action laws underlying bouncing behavior.

Theory:

Adaptive behavior can be understood as emerging from the perception-action cycle, the interaction between an agent and its environment (Warren, 2006). The two systems are coupled mechanically, through forces exerted by the agent, and informationally, through optic, acoustic, and haptic variables. When the agent performs an action, forces are applied that change the state of the environment in accordance with the laws of physics, and generate new information in accordance with the laws of optics, acoustics, etc. (Gibson, 1979). Reciprocally, this information is used to regulate the forces that the agent applies to the environment, in accordance with laws of control for a given task. These interactions give rise to the dynamics of behavior, with attractors that correspond to preferred, stable behavioral solutions (Saltzman & Kelso, 1987). Such stabilities reflect the constraints of the agent-environment system, including the physics of the environment, the biomechanics of the body, sensory information, and the demands of the task.

Experiments:

The task of rhythmically bouncing a ball on a racket provides a deceptively simple but conceptually rich model system that incorporates all of these constraints, allowing us to investigate the dynamics of perception and action. Within this framework we  address such questions as what properties define a behavioral attractor, how agents capitalize on the physics of the world to organize behavior, whether behavior is passively stable or actively controlled, and how information is exploited in the process. In this project, we are running real and virtual ball bouncing experiments (see Morice et al., 2007, 2008 for recent results) to understand how humans discover a new attractor and use it to stabilize their behavior. Ball bouncing provides a particular instance of the general problem of how people learn stable behavioral solutions to everyday tasks as they interact with the physical environment, from manipulating tools and other objects to learning skills such as skiing or cycling.

Key references:

1. Morice A., Siegler I., & Bardy B. G. (2005). Exploiting new perception-action solutions in ball bouncing. H. Heft & K. L Marsh (Eds.), Studies in perception and action VIII  (pp. 177-180). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
   
2. Morice, A., Siegler, I., Bardy, B. G., & Warren, W. H. (2007). Learning new perception-action solutions in virtual ball bouncing (2007). Experimental Brain Research, 181, 249-265.
3. Morice, A., Siegler, I., & Bardy, B. G. (2008). Action-perception patterns in virtual ball-bouncing: Combating system latency and tracking functional validity. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 169, 255-266.
4. Siegler, I., Bardy, B. G., & Warren, W. H (in press). Passive vs. active control of rhyitmic ball bouncing: The role of visual information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.