For humans navigating without vision, navigation depends upon the layout of mechanically contacted ground surfaces.

Navigation can be haptically guided. In specific, tissue deformations arising from both limb motions during locomotion (i.e., gait patterns) and mechanical interactions between the limbs and the environment can convey information, detected by the haptic perceptual system, about how the body is moving relative to the environment. Here, we test hypotheses concerning the properties of mechanically contacted environments relevant to navigation of this kind. We studied blindfolded participants implicitly learning to perceive their location within environments that were physically encountered via walking on, stepping on, and probing ground surfaces with a cane. Environments were straight-line paths with elevated sections where the path either narrowed or remained the same width. We formed hypotheses concerning how these two environments would affect spatial updating and reorientation processes. In the constant pathwidth environment, homing task accuracy was higher and a manipulation of the elevated surface, to be either unchanged or (unbeknown to participants) shortened, biased the performance. This was consistent with our hypothesis of a metric recalibration scaled to elevated surface extent. In the narrowing pathwidth environment, elevated surface shortening did not bias performance. This supported our hypothesis of positional recalibration resulting from contact with the leading edge of the elevated surface. We discuss why certain environmental properties, such as path-narrowing, have significance for how one becomes implicitly oriented the surrounding environment.

Interaction between intention and environmental constraints on the fractal dynamics of human performance.

The current study investigated whether the influence of available task constraints on power-law scaling might be moderated by a participant's task intention. Participants performed a simple rhythmic movement task with the intention of controlling either movement period or amplitude, either with or without an experimental stimulus designed to constrain period. In the absence of the stimulus, differences in intention did not produce any changes in power-law scaling. When the stimulus was present, however, a shift toward more random fluctuations occurred in the corresponding task dimension, regardless of participants' intentions. More importantly, participants' intentions interacted with available task constraints to produce an even greater shift toward random variation when the task dimension constrained by the stimulus was also the dimension the participant intended to control. Together, the results suggest that intentions serve to more tightly constrain behavior to existing environmental constraints, evidenced by changes in the fractal scaling of task performance.

Dynamic structure of joint-action stimulus-response activity.

The mere presence of a co-actor can influence an individual's response behavior. For instance, a social Simon effect has been observed when two individuals perform a Go/No-Go response to one of two stimuli in the presence of each other, but not when they perform the same task alone. Such effects are argued to provide evidence that individuals co-represent the task goals and the to-be-performed actions of a co-actor. Motivated by the complex-systems approach, the present study was designed to investigate an alternative hypothesis--that such joint-action effects are due to a dynamical (time-evolving) interpersonal coupling that operates to perturb the behavior of socially situated actors. To investigate this possibility, participants performed a standard Go/No-Go Simon task in joint and individual conditions. The dynamic structure of recorded reaction times was examined using fractal statistics and instantaneous cross-correlation. Consistent with our hypothesis that participants responding in a shared space would become behaviorally coupled, the analyses revealed that reaction times in the joint condition displayed decreased fractal structure (indicative of interpersonal perturbation processes modulating ongoing participant behavior) compared to the individual condition, and were more correlated across a range of time-scales compared to the reaction times of pseudo-pair controls. Collectively, the findings imply that dynamic processes might underlie social stimulus-response compatibility effects and shape joint cognitive processes in general.