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Motor lab

Our motor lab provides facilities for experiments that examine actions that are more natural than key presses and mouse clicks used in traditional experiments. This enables us to improve our understanding of action planning, action preparation, and action execution. Additionally, studying naturalistic actions provides a new perspective on many aspects of vision given that vision and action are inextricably intertwined.

In our experiments, participants have to interact with either real-world objects (e.g., wood blocks as in the image above), or other people. For analyzing their motoric behavior, the motor lab houses motion trackers and other devices, such as electromagnetic high-precision trackers (Polhemus; https://polhemus.com/) that allow us to record trajectories of hands or other body parts of interest.

Motoric behavior can also be recorded with touch responses or stylus input. Even though computer keyboards and mouse devices have found their way into everyday life, the finger touches and stylus taps possible with tablet computers provide a much more direct access to target-directed behavior. For this purpose, we use a high-end graphical tablet PC in the motor lab. The Wacom MobileStudio Pro 16 (https://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-computers/wacom-mobilestudio-pro-16) provides high spatial, color, and input resolutions, sensitive measurement of the force applied to the stylus, and it can detect the angle at which the stylus is used. It is therefore well suited for perception and action experiments.