| REU 2008 - Mentor abstract |
 |
Herb Pick
Child Development
Dr. Pick's research is concerned very generally with how people maintain orientation as they move about. One facet of this research being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Celia Gershenson consists of an investigation of way finding and navigation by drivers. Drivers have a very complicated task that involves dividing attention between vehicle operation and finding their way to a destination. How is this cognitive problem solved? Elderly drivers have a much higher accident rate (per mile driven) than younger drivers. One factor contributing to this may be greater difficulty in dividing attention between these two driving tasks.
A second facet of Dr. Pick’s research is the analogous problem of how we keep track of where we are when we walk around the environment. Our ability to do this is quite good even when we have no visual information, for example, when we get up on a dark night and grope our way to the refrigerator or when we are blindfolded. Dr. Pick and his colleagues have been investigating how we are able to do this. One hypothesis guiding their research is that we have calibrated our biomechanical stepping when we walk with vision and can use this calibration to update our knowledge of where we are when we are forced to walk without vision.
- Pick, H.L., Jr. (1999). Cognitive Maps. In R. Wilson and F. Keil (Eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences, (pp. 135-137). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Pick, H.L., Jr. (1999). Human Navigation. In R. Wilson and F. Keil (Eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences, (pp. 380-382). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Pick, H.L., Jr. & Pick, A.D. (1999). James J. Gibson. In R. Wilson & F. Keil (Eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Pick, H.L., Jr., Rieser, J.J., Wagner, D. & Garing, A.E. (1999). The recalibration of rotational locomotion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 1179-1188.
- Bruggeman, H., Pick, H. L. Jr., & Rieser, J. J. (2005). Learning to throw on a rotating carousel: recalibratin based on limb dynamics and projectile kinemaetics, Experimental Brain Research, 163, 188-197.
<Back to Mentors 2008 |
