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.
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