Evaluation of object functionality and mechanical reasoning in humans
Final Report Abstract
Across four experimental studies with very different approaches and groups of participants we found clear-cut evidence for a dissociable contribution of tool knowledge, which Schubotz et al. (2014) would term "action codes" and Noppeney (2008) as "action semantics", one the one hand and high-level visual analysis and mental simulation of tools (Hegarty, 2004) on the other hand to a pre-use evaluation of real tools. Using the very same stimulus material across patients, healthy elderly adults, and healthy young adults revealedconsistent results. Gaze tracking in a tool pantomime task turned out to be a sensitive quantitative measure for tool knowledge in young healthy adults to be exploited in future studies involving patients. Quite surprising was a strong main effect of familiarity on the understanding and evaluation of a tools mechanics in our behavioral studies. All the more as particularly pMTG, a structure that has been repeatedly associated with tool knowledge did not show particularly high signals in the evaluation of familiar tools in comparison to unfamiliar ones. In contrast, all cortical areas that would be typically associated with mental simulation of tool use indeed showed higher signals for unfamiliar tools. This finding from our fMRI studies argues for a rather intense mental search for a possible usage of unfamiliar tools, whereas the behavioral data from our patient studies would argue for a strong evaluation bias dominated by tool knowledge. This point obviously deserves further investigation as much as functional and structural connectivity between the cortical areas that we found to be activated in three tool semantics fmri experiments.
Publications
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(2018) An MR-Compatible Haptic Interface With Seven Degrees of Freedom. IEEE/ASME Trans. Mechatron. (IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics) 23 (2) 624–635
Kuhne, Markus; Eschelbach, Martin; Aghaeifar, Ali; Pflugk, Lisa von; Thielscher, Axel; Himmelbach, Marc; Scheffler, Klaus; van Smagt der, Patrick; Peer, Angelika
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(2013). Der Mensch denkt - Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der bildgebenden Hirnforschung. In: J Audretsch, K Nagorni (eds.) Der Mensch und sein Gehirn. Karlsruhe, Evangelische Akademie Baden 12-68
Himmelbach, M.
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(2013). Limb apraxia in acute ischemic stroke: A neglected clinical challenge? Neurocase, 20(2), 158-162
Schell, C., Suchan, J., Himmelbach, M., Haarmeier, T., & Borchers, S.
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(2016). Anticipatory eye fixations reveal tool knowledge for tool interaction. Experimental Brain Research, 234(8), 2415-2431
Belardinelli, A., Barabas, M., Himmelbach, M., & Butz, M. V.
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(2016). Impairment of tool evaluation in patients with apraxia. Annual Meeting Society for Neuroscience, San Diego, Abstract No. 801.17
Himmelbach, M., Barabas, M., Kirschner, A.
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(2016). The cortical network of usability evaluations for unknown tools. Annual Meeting Society for Neuroscience, San Diego, Abstract No. 801.16
Gann, M., Himmelbach, M.
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(2018). Preserved Expert Object Recognition in a Case of Unilateral Visual Agnosia. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 30(2), 131-143
Rennig, J., Cornelsen, S., Wilhelm, H., Himmelbach, M., & Karnath, H.-O.
