James, S. orcid.org/0000-0003-0208-0588, Bell, O.A., Nazli, M.A.M. et al. (8 more authors) (2017) Target-distractor synchrony affects performance in a novel motor task for studying action selection. PLoS One, 12 (5). e0176945.
Abstract
The study of action selection in humans can present challenges of task design since our actions are usually defined by many degrees of freedom and therefore occupy a large action-space. While saccadic eye-movement offers a more constrained paradigm for investigating action selection, the study of reach-and-grasp in upper limbs has often been defined by more complex scenarios, not easily interpretable in terms of such selection. Here we present a novel motor behaviour task which addresses this by limiting the action space to a single degree of freedom in which subjects have to track (using a stylus) a vertical coloured target line displayed on a tablet computer, whilst ignoring a similarly oriented distractor line in a different colour. We ran this task with 55 subjects and showed that, in agreement with previous studies, the presence of the distractor generally increases the movement latency and directional error rate. Further, we used two distractor conditions according to whether the distractor's location changes asynchronously or synchronously with the location of the target. We found that the asynchronous distractor yielded poorer performance than its synchronous counterpart, with significantly higher movement latencies and higher error rates. We interpret these results in an action selection framework with two actions (move left or right) and competing 'action requests' offered by the target and distractor. As such, the results provide insights into action selection performance in humans and supply data for directly constraining future computational models therein.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 James et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering (Sheffield) The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Psychology (Sheffield) The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Mathematics and Statistics (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EUROPEAN COMMISSION - FP6/FP7 NO TREMOR - 610391 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 16 May 2017 13:58 |
Last Modified: | 16 May 2017 13:58 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0176945 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Public Library of Science |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0176945 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:116238 |