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Movement Sonification has been shown to enhance motor learning of a complex gross motor skill

The present study investigates the mechanisms behind interpersonal coupling by using movement sonification.

The present study investigates the mechanisms behind interpersonal coupling by using movement sonification. Therefore the impact of kinematic and dynamic sonifications on movement synchronization and perceptual accuracy were compared. In a first session, the participants rowed on an indoor rower to sonifications of another person. In a second session, they listened to sonifications of their own and to those of other persons and estimated rowing frequencies. The results permit conclusions about the structure of motor representations and give perspectives for sport practice.

Entorhinal cortex receptive fields are modulated by spatial attention, even without movement.

Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex have been identified to encode an animal’s position in space, but have been hypothesized to play a more fundamental role in mental operations.

A prerequisite for this is that they can be activated in the absence of movement. Here, we investigated whether firing fields of entorhinal cells are activated by movements of covert attention, in the absence of any physical movement. For the study, we recorded the neuronal activity of 141 neurons in the entorhinal cortex of two rhesus macaque monkeys performing a covert attention tracking task. The results reveal that movement of covert attention, without any physical movement, also elicits spatial receptive fields with a triangular tiling of the space.

Audiovisual integration is affected by performing a task jointly

In multisensory research, several factors have been investigated that could affect

the   process of multisensory integration. However, social factors  (i.e.,  whether a  task is  performed alone or jointly) have been widely neglected. In this article, we used an audiovisual crossmodal congruency task to investigate whether social factors affect audiovisual integration. Pairs of participants received congruent or incongruent audiovisual  stimuli and  were required  to indicate  the elevation of these stimuli.
The reaction time cost of responding  to  incongruent  stimuli  (relative  to  congruent  stimuli) was  reduced  significantly  when  participants  performed  the  task jointly compared  to performing  it alone.These results are in line with earlier findings on visuotactile integration in joint action.

Are allocentric spatial reference frames compatible with theories of enactivism?

This study investigates whether spatial navigation based on allocentric

This study investigates whether spatial navigation based on allocentric
reference frames, which are by definition independent of the observer's
body, can be understood within an action-oriented approach. Three
experiments tested the knowledge of the absolute orientation of houses
and streets towards the north, the relative orientation of two houses
and two streets, respectively, and the location of houses towards each
other in a pointing task. The main results showed that under time
pressure, people were more accurate on the relative orientation task for
houses but they were more accurate on the absolute orientation task for
streets. Performance in the pointing task was best. This demonstrates
that information in all-centric reference frames is coded in an action
oriented way.

Size Matters: How Scaling Affects the Interaction between Grid and Border Cells

It has been suggested that border-to-grid cells' associations minimize the accumulated grid cells'  error when rodents explore enclosures.

Thus, the border-grid interaction for error minimization is a suitable scenario to study the effects of border cell scaling within the context of spatial  representation. In this study, two questions were computationally addressed: 1. Does border cells' scale play a role in maintaining the regularity of grid cells' firing fields? 2. What are the underlying mechanisms of grid-border associations relative to the scales of both grid and border cells. The results suggest that for optimal contribution to grid cells' error minimization, border cells should express smaller firing fields relative to those of the associated grid cells, which is consistent with the hypothesis of border cells functioning as spatial anchoring signals.

Empowerment As Replacement for the Three Laws of Robotics

The greater ubiquity of robots creates a need for generic guidelines for robot behavior. How should a heuristic look like to motivate the robot's behavior in interaction with human agents?

This article makes a concrete, operational proposal as to how the information-theoretic concept of empowerment can be used as a generic heuristic to quantify concepts, such as self-preservation, protection of the human partner, and responding to human actions.

Exploration and Exploitation in Natural Viewing Behavior

Many eye-tracking studies investigate visual behavior with a focus on image
features and the semantic content of a scene. Our understanding of the

Many eye-tracking studies investigate visual behavior with a focus on image
features and the semantic content of a scene. Our understanding of the
decision process where to look has reached a mature stage. However, the
temporal aspect, whether to stay and further scrutinize a region
(exploitation) or to move on and explore image regions that were yet not in
the focus of attention (exploration) is less well understood. Here, we
investigate the trade-off between these two processes across stimuli with
varying properties and sizes.

Humans treat unreliable filled-in percepts as more real than veridical ones

Humans often evaluate sensory signals according to their reliability for optimal decision-making.

However, how do we evaluate percepts generated in the absence of direct input that are, therefore, completely unreliable? Here we utilize the phenomenon of filling-in occurring at the physiological
blind-spots to compare partially inferred and veridical percepts. Subjects chose between stimuli that elicit filling-in, and perceptually equivalent ones presented outside the blind-spots, looking for a Gabor stimulus without a small orthogonal inset. In ambiguous conditions, when the stimuli were
physically identical and the inset was absent in both, subjects behaved opposite to optimal, preferring the blind-spot stimulus as the better example of a collinear stimulus, even though no relevant veridical information was available. Thus, a percept that is partially inferred is paradoxically considered more reliable than a percept based on external input. In other words: Humans treat filled-in inferred percepts as more real than veridical ones.

Which type of information improves the performance in a joint visuospatial task?

In the present study, we investigated how performance in a visuospatial collaborative task depends on the received

In the present study, we investigated how performance in a visuospatial collaborative task depends on the received type of information (i.e., performance feedback, information about the co-actor's actions, or both) in several experiments. In all experiments, the performance of the pair exceeded the individual performances and also the combined individual performances. Findings of the study  indicate which type of information is crucial for developing effective devision of labour strategies in collaborative visuospatial tasks. Moreover, findings are not only of interest for human-human interactions but also relevant for human-robot interactions.

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