Speakers

We have had confirmation that

Prof. Bill Warren (USA)
Prof. Walter Freeman (USA)
Prof. Peter Beek (Netherlands)
Prof. Karl Newell (USA)

will each give a Keynote Address at the conference.

In addition Bill Warren will conduct a Workshop on the dynamics of perception and action.

Mr Frank Gardner will give a special presentation after the Dennis Glencross Award at the Sunday lunch.



Bill Warren

Prof. William H. Warren (Brown University, Providence, RI, USA) is considered the leading expert in the study of how visual information constrains and guides locomotion and posture. His seminal work on what kinds of actions stairs afford kick-started a completely new experimental paradigm within the tradition of ecological (aka "Gibsonian") psychology and motor control research. Similarly his investigations of optic flow were among the first to experimentally investigate the importance of informational flow-fields for the constraint of locomotion.

Bill Warren received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut (1982) and did post-doctoral work at the University of Edinburgh (1983); he has been a visiting scholar at Utrecht University (1989) and the University of California, Berkeley (1995-6). His research combines ecological and dynamical approaches in order to understand human perception and action, adopting the visual control of locomotion as a case study. Related motor control research has investigated the dynamics of gait transitions, the coordination of posture and gait, and motor learning in a "baby bouncer". The underlying theme of this work is that behavior is organized around stable solutions defined over physical and informational constraints. On three occasions, he has introduced research paradigms that opened up new territory in the field - on the study of affordances (Warren, 1984), visual-motor control (Warren, Young, & Lee, 1986), and optic flow (Warren & Hannon, 1988, 1990). He is currently using interactive virtual reality techniques to study visual control of walking and visual navigation, having co-developed the largest virtual enviroment facility to date, with a 12 m x 12 m tracking area. He is the recipient of a National Research Service Award from NIH (1983), a Fulbright Research Fellowship (1989), Brown's Elizabeth Leduc Teaching Award for Excellence in the Life Sciences (1995), and a Research Career Development Award from NIMH (1997-2002).

Bill will also conduct a 3-hr Workshop on perception-action coupling on Thursday afternoon.

Prof. Warren will give a Keynote Address entitled:

"Visual control of posture and locomotion"

Please see also: http://www.cog.brown.edu/~warren


Walter Freeman

Prof. Walter J. Freeman (Berkeley, CA, USA) is considered the leading expert in the field of applying EEG analysis to issues of the dynamical neurophysiological constraints on behaviour. He brings a wealth of experience to the problems of characterising exactly what nervous systems do during goal-directed activity. Of great interest is his willingness to consider and analyse the perception of affordances and production of goal-directed action in terms of the nonlinear dynamics of neurophysiological processes.

Walter Freeman studied physics and mathematics at M.I.T., philosophy at the University of Chicago, and medicine at Yale University (M.D. cum laude 1954). After interning at Johns Hopkins he studied neurophysiology at UCLA under the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry. He received the A. E. Bennett Award from the Society of Biological Psychiatry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Titulaire de la Chaire Solvay, Université Libre de Bruxelles, a MERIT Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Pioneer Award from the IEEE. He was President of the International Neural Network Society in 1994. He has taught brain science in the University of California at Berkeley since 1959, where he is Professor of the Graduate School. He has published over 300 articles and 4 books including "Mass Action in the Nervous System" (1975), "Societies of Brains" (1995), "How Brains Make Up Their Minds" (1999), and "Neurodynamics, an Exploration in Mesoscopic Brain Dynamics" (2000).

Prof. Freeman will give a Keynote Address entitled:

"Direction by limbic dynamics based in reafference of
intentional movements through space-time"

Please also see: http://mcb.berkeley.edu/faculty/NEU/freemanw.html

Peter Beek

Prof. Peter J. Beek (Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) is a movement scientist with research interests that include the coordination of rhythmic limb movements, perception-action coupling, motor learning, rehabilitation, and development. His theoretical orientation in studying these topics is strongly influenced by dynamical systems theory (especially Haken's synergetics) and the ecological approach to perception and action, even though he has a keen eye for the limitations of these approaches in understanding the biological organization of movement. He has written several articles on juggling, (poly)rhythmic tapping and the swinging of pendulums and other manipulanda. In addition, he has written about conceptual issues in the dynamical/ecological approach to motor control. Peter Beek and Piet van Wieringen are the editors of Human Movement Science, a multidisiplinary joural devoted to the study of biomechanical, neurophysiological and psychological aspects of motor control.

Prof. Beek will give a Keynote Address entitled:
"Coordination and vision in juggling"

Karl Newell

Prof. Karl M. Newell (Pennsylvania State University, USA) is considered the leading researcher in the area of coordination, control, and skill. He has consistently explored issues related to learning and skill acquisition from the dual perspectives of nonlinear dynamics and ecological psychology, maintaining that it is only through the careful attention to insights from both fields that any real progress will be made in the conceptually difficult area that we call "motor control".

Prof. Newell is professor and head of the Department of Kinesiology at The Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Newell’s research interests lie in the area of human movement in general and more specifically in motor learning and control. His research focuses on the coordination, control and skill of normal and abnormal human movement across the lifespan; mental retardation and motor skills; and, drug and exercise influences on movement control. He is well known for his contributions on the movement speed-accuracy relation, the structure of movement variability, and information for the learning of new movement forms.

Prof. Newell will give a Keynote Address entitled:
"Changing Degrees of Freedom in Motor Learning and Control"


Workshop: The dynamics of perception and action
Prof. Warren will lead a 3-hour workshop on Thursday afternoon (2-5 pm) prior to the Welcome Party. The workshop will offer attendees the chance to gain valuable hands-on insight into research on perception-action coupling, and how this links in with the dynamics of movement. All attendees are welcome to participate in this Workshop at no added cost.