Up to 5% of the primary school
population may display specific problems with movement co-ordination. The agreed
term, amongst the international research community, for this problem is
Developmental Co-ordination Disorder (DCD) although amongst parents and
therapists the children may be referred to as Dyspraxic. The problems the
children experience with co-ordination, however, go beyond just "not being
good at sport" and seriously impede progress in acquiring skills such as
running, jumping, catching and handwriting. Our approach has been to appraise
the extent to which specific co-ordination problems can be explained by
perceptual or motor processes. All of the skills highlighted earlier require
some degree of eye-hand or eye-body co-ordination: If a child stumbles and
collides with a doorway, was the problem that the child mis-perceived their
speed and the impending collision, or was it purely an error in activating
muscles at the right time and in the right order?
A primary role of visual
perception is to support behaviour. A group of behaviours that are particularly
relevant to animal survival are locomotion, steering and avoidance or control of
collisions. Our research focus is on human perception of heading direction and
the control of steering in locomotion as well as judgements of impeding
collision is tasks such as ball catching or
driving. Studies are based around
using 3D simulations (virtual reality) to explore the use of cues in
pseudo-naturalistic settings.
Research supported by EPSRC
Our research also generalises to
the design of 3d simulations. If a VR system is to be used for training purposes
what are the most important cues to ensure support for natural behaviour. In the
context of tele-operation, relaying "real" 3D images to a remote
operator does not by-pass this issue if relevant cues such as binocular
disparity or vergence are compromised.
Research supported by EPSRC, Action Research
Olympus Japan, Exponant Failure Analysis USA, Sharp Europe.
Field,
D.T. & Wann, J.P.
(2005). Perceiving time to collision activates sensorimotor cortex. Current
Biology,
15(5), 453-458
Wilkie
R.M. & Wann
J.P. (2003) Eye-movements aid the control of locomotion. Journal
of Vision,(11), 677-684
Wilkie R.M. &
Wann J.P. (2003) Controlling Steering and Judging Heading:
Retinal flow, visual direction and extra-retinal information. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 29 (2),
363-378
Wilkie R.M. &
Wann J.P. (2002) Driving as Night Falls: The Contribution
of Retinal Flow and Visual Direction to the Control of Steering. Current
Biology,
12 (23), 2014-2017
Wann J.P. & Land M.F. (2000) Steering with or without
the flow: Is the recovery of heading necessary? Trends in Cognitive Science
4, 319-324.
Wann J.P. & Swapp D.K. (2000) Why you should look
where you are going. Nature Neuroscience 3, 647-648.
Wann J.P., Swapp D.K. & Rushton S.K. (2000) Heading
Perception and the allocation of attention. Vision Research 40,
2533-2543.
Rushton, S.K. & J. P. Wann (1999). Weighted
combination of size and disparity: a computational model for timing a
ball-catch. Nature Neuroscience 2, 186-190.
More information is available on my
Publications page.
