Invariant and variable relations emerge with degrees of difficulty within habitual and surprise touch-pointing motions

Abstract

This work was supported by NSF Cyber Enabled Discovery and Innovation Type I Grant # 094158 •The variability inherently present in the speed of the hand motions intended towards the targets serves to distinguish individual rates of adaptation •This paradigm can be combined with robotic motions to study human-robots interactions during pointing and reaching behaviors •The complexity of the number of surprise / targets induces different degrees of learning and adaptation in habitual behaviors •Different levels of kinematics analyses reveal different levels of learning •We plan to include in future studies individuals with ASD and PD and predict different types of adaptive behavior in each group •These indexes may indicate the degree of flexibility of the person when switching between habitual and novel settings BACKGROUND Goal directed movements have different levels of automaticity. Some movements are habitual while others require more deliberate processing. The variability from trial in continuous, natural movements can be informative of the levels of automaticity in the motions, particularly as people adapt to the context of the motions. We here examine the extent to which habitual pointing motions to targets on a touch screen are impacted by surprising targets appearing at random locations of the screen as the subjects perform highly automated pointing motions We use a new Statistical Platform for Individualized Behavioral Analyses (SPIBA) and examine the adaptive progression of young undergraduates as they face different degrees of complexity in the target stimuli and surprise factor. MOTIVATION This is preliminary work to gather normative data in neurotypical subjects and use the paradigm and methods to study individuals with neurological disorders on a spectrum. These include subjects with Parkinson’s disease and Autism Spectrum Disorders. In both populations the balance between voluntary and spontaneous control of goal directed actions is impeded. Yet each group has different types of impairments in adaptive behaviors.