Charles E. WrightAssociate Professor, Cognitive Sciences |
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Research Interests |
Cognitive psychology, human motor control, Fitts task, aimed movements, handwriting, immersive virtual reality, 1/f noise, quantitative models. | |
| URL | searle.ss.uci.edu/cew | |
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Research Abstract |
Until the last two years, the main goal of my research was to develop a quantitative understanding of the cognitive mechanisms necessary to learn and carry out skilled movements. The main body of this research addresses the central questions of motor-program representation and generalizability. Lashley, over 40 years ago, made the point that component movements in skilled performance are too rapid, and too dependent on upcoming component movements to be described as learned responses to stimulus input. There must be a detailed, central representation of the movement plan that generates appropriately coordinated component movements. One obvious question concerns the nature of these representations. A second question is whether and how, having become skilled at one movement, we can transfer the information learned to a related but different movement. Thus, does motor learning take the form of generalized specifications involving abstract elements or is this learning embodied in separate representations that, because they have been developed to solve related motor problems, share many features. I have studied these issues using handwriting, rhythmic performance, aimed hand movements, and bimanual movements. The pursuit of these basic research questions has also led me to several applied research projects involving clinical populations (patients with Alzheimer's dementia, Parkinson's disease, and focal dystonia of the hand) and handwriting pedagogy. In addition to this research, during the last two years, I have devoted much of my time to a new collaboration, with Charlie Chubb, studying visual psychophysics based on our ability to plan and control movements rather than the traditional methods of detection and discrimination. The impetus for this research comes from differences in the processing done by and the visual projections to the ventral and dorsal processing streams. |
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| Publications | Wright, C. E. (1990). Generalized motor programs: Reevaluating claims of effector independence. In M. Jeannerod (Ed.),"Attention and Performance XIII: Motor Representation and Control" (Chapter 9, pp. 294-320). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. | |
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Wright, C. E. (1990). Controlling sequential motor activity. In Osherson, D., Kosslyn, S. M., & Hollerbach, J. M. (Eds.), "Invitation to Cognitive Science: Visual Cognition and Action", Volume 2 (Chapter 5, pp. 285-316). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. |
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| Wright, C. E. (1993). Evaluating the special role of time in the control of writing. Acta Psychologica, 82, 5-52. | ||
| Collier, G. L. & Wright C. E. (1995). Generalized motor programs, temporal rescaling, and simple rhythmic performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21, 602-627. | ||
| Lindemann, P. G. & Wright, C. E. (1998). Skill acquisition and plans for actions: Learning to write with your other hand. In Sternberg, S. & Scarborough, D. (Eds.), Invitation to Cognitive Science, vol. 4 (pp. 523-584). MIT Press. | ||
| States, R. A. & Wright, C. E. (2001). The interplay of biomechanical constraints and kinematic strategies in selecting arm postures. Journal of Motor Behavior, 3, 165-179. | ||
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Professional Societies |
Psychonomic Society International Association for the Study of Attention and Performance International Graphonomics Society American Psychological Association American Psychological Society |
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| Research Center | Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences | |
| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2451 | |
| Last updated | 03/13/2006 | |