David A. Rosenbaum

• Ph.D.
• Professor at Pennsylvania State University

Nous utilisons quotidiennement le toucher pour trouver des objets, comme chercher des clés dans nos poches ou des stylos dans les tiroirs de notre bureau. Dans de tels contextes, nous nous engageons dans une recherche haptique « libre ». Les objets que nous sentons peuvent être déplacés librement et nos mains peuvent bouger librement. La recherche...

How do we decide where to search for a target? Optimal search relies on first considering the relative informational value of different locations and then executing eye movements to the best options. However, many participants consistently move their eyes to locations that can be easily ascertained to neither contain the target nor provide new info...

Background: In this opinion we consider the roles of physical and cognitive effort in choosing between actions that make different physical and cognitive demands. View of the past: In choosing between a less or more demanding physical task, the cognitive effort of each was not expected to have a large effect. Current state: However, people are will...

How do people determine the relative difficulty of mental tasks and physical tasks, and how do they determine the preferred order of such tasks? Is it harder to make such decisions if 1 task is mainly mental and the other is mainly physical than if both tasks are the same kind? To address these questions, we conducted 3 experiments. In experiment 1...

Which task is easier, doing arithmetic problems of specified form for some specified duration, or carrying a bucket of specified weight over some specified distance? If it is possible to choose between the “more cognitive” task and the “more physical” task, how are the difficulty levels of the tasks compared? We conducted two experiments in which p...

People often try to complete tasks as soon as possible, even at the expense of extra effort-a phenomenon called precrastination (Rosenbaum et al., 2014). Because precrastination is so widespread-as in answering emails too quickly, submitting papers before they have been polished, or, on larger scales, convicting people in the rush to judgment, or e...

A great deal of research has concerned choices of goods or services with different values receivable at various times. Temporal discounting – the magnification of values that can be obtained sooner rather than later – has proven to be immensely important in this regard. In the present article, we shift the focus from the receipt of goods or service...

How do we compare the difficulty of different kinds of tasks, and how we do sequence tasks of different kinds when the basis for the ordering is the tasks’ difficulty levels? The ability to do these things requires a common currency, but the identity of that currency, if it exists, is unknown. We hypothesized that people may believe that the time t...

What makes a task hard or easy? The question seems easy, but answering it has been hard. The only consensus has been that, all else being equal, easy tasks can be performed by more individuals than hard tasks, and easy tasks are usually preferred over hard tasks. Feghhi and Rosenbaum ( Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor...

The ultimate tool, it could be said, is the brain and body. Therefore, a way to understand tool use is to study the brain's control of the body. A more manageable aim is to use the tools of cognitive science to explore the planning of physical actions. Here, I focus on two kinds of physical acts which directly or indirectly involve tool use: produc...

Little is known about how effort is represented for different kinds of tasks. Recently, we suggested that it would help to establish empirical benchmarks for this problem. Accordingly, Feghhi and Rosenbaum (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45:983–994, 2019) estimated how many additional digits to be memorized co...

What accounts for the subjective difficulty of a task? It is easy to suggest ad hoc measures, such as how many individuals can do the task, how long it takes them to do it, how likely they are to complete it, how much attention it requires, and so on. But having such ad hoc measures may miss the point that it is possible to judge the relative diffi...

A core question in the study of the dynamics of cognition is how tasks are ordered. Given two tasks, neither of which is prerequisite for the other and neither of which brings a clearly greater reward, which task will be done first? Few studies have addressed this question, though recent work has suggested one possible answer, which we here call th...

People judge the relative difficulty of different kinds of tasks all the time, yet little is known about how they do so. We asked university students to choose between tasks that taxed perceptual-motor control and memorization to different degrees. Our participants decided whether to carry a box through a wide (81cm) or narrow (36 cm) gap after mem...

Putting things off as long as possible (procrastination) is a well-known tendency. Less well known is the tendency to attempt to get things done as soon as possible, even if that involves extra effort (precrastination). Since its discovery in 2014, precrastination has been demonstrated in humans and animals and has recently been revealed in an anal...

Research on motor planning has revealed two seemingly contradictory phenomena. One is the end-state comfort effect, the tendency to grasp objects in physically awkward ways for the sake of comfortable or easy-to-control final postures (Rosenbaum et al., Attention and Performance XIII: Motor representation and control, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, H...

The science of mental life and behavior has paid scant attention to the means by which mental life is translated into physical behavior. Why this is so was the topic of a 2005 American Psychologist article whose main title was “The Cinderella of Psychology.” In the present article, we briefly review some of the reasons why motor control was relegat...

Although reaching and walking are commonly coordinated, their coordination has been little studied. We investigated decision-making related to reaching and walking in connection with a recently discovered phenomenon called pre-crastination-the tendency to expend extra effort in the service of hastening goal or sub-goal completion. In the earlier st...

Purpose Specific language impairment (SLI) affects many children, but its symptomatology is still being characterized. An emerging view, which challenges the notion that SLI is specific to language, is that SLI may actually reflect a domain-general deficit in procedural learning. We explored an extension of this hypothesis that a core deficit in SL...

Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate whether dual language experience affects procedural learning ability in typically developing children and in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method We examined procedural learning in monolingual and bilingual school-aged children (ages 8–12 years) with and without SLI. The typicall...

Tasks that require less physical effort are generally preferred over more physically demanding alternatives. Similarly, tasks that require less mental effort are generally preferred over more mentally demanding alternatives. But what happens when one must choose between tasks that entail different kinds of effort, one mainly physical (e.g., carryin...

There is no generally accepted method for measuring manual position control. We developed a method for doing so. We asked university students to hold a handle that had one rotational degree of freedom. The angular position of the handle depended on the degree of pronation-supination of the forearm. The subjects' task was to hold the handle as stead...

Although hand preference is one of the best known features of performance, a recent study of object transfer behavior (Coelho, Studenka, & Rosenbaum, J Exp Psychol Human Percept Perform, 40:718-730, 2014) showed that people place greater emphasis on using the hand that avoids extreme joint angles than on using the hand they normally prefer. In the...

The present study investigated whether special haptic or visual feedback would facilitate the coordination of in-phase, cyclical feet movements of different amplitudes. Seventeen healthy participants sat with their feet on sliding panels that were moved externally over the same or different amplitudes. The participants were asked to generate simult...

When asked to shape a cylindrical vessel on the potter's wheel, potters make shorter pots when one or two of their modalities are reduced than when all their modalities are available. This outcome may reflect a tendency to maintain control over the pot while the wheel is rotating.

When potters throw a vessel on a wheel, they use visual, proprioceptive/tactile, and auditory feedback. We asked 24 ceramics students to throw a vessel on a potter’s wheel when all possible pairs of these three sensory modalities were attenuated and, in the control condition, when none of the modalities was attenuated. The conditions were tested in...

This paper reviews the findings of recent studies examining the motor abilities of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Standardized measures of motor ability confirm that children with SLI exhibit deficits in fine and gross motor skill, both simple and complex. These difficulties also extend to speech-motor ability, particularly with...

Smeets et al suggested that motor adjustments may be quick because they don't require stimulus detection. We agree that these rapid adjustments probably reflect rapid perceptual processing rather than rapid motor execution, but we question whether the absence of detection is the best way to explain the effect. We suggest that it is unclear what mec...

Simple acts of picking up a water glass or turning a handle are the product of multi-layered cognitive plans and sophisticated neural computations. A thumb-up posture would have probably allowed the guard to have greater power and more control. Healthcare professionals may find work relevant for informing medical diagnosis and rehabilitation. Regul...

In this article, we describe a phenomenon we discovered while conducting experiments on walking and reaching. We asked university students to pick up either of two buckets, one to the left of an alley and one to the right, and to carry the selected bucket to the alley's end. In most trials, one of the buckets was closer to the end point. We emphasi...

ABSTRACT Understanding interactions between cognitive and motor performance is an important theoretical and practical aim of motor neuroscience. Toward this aim, we invited university students to move one hand back and forth at a self-paced rate either in silence or while overtly generating words from semantic categories. The same participants also...

The end-state comfort effect is the tendency to use an uncomfortable initial grasp posture for object manipulation if this leads to a comfortable final posture. Many studies have replicated the end-state comfort effect across a range of tasks and conditions. However, these tasks had in common that they involved relatively simple movements, such as...

A goal of research on human perception and performance is to explore the relative importance of constraints shaping action selection. The present study concerned the relative importance of two constraints that have not been directly contrasted: (1) the tendency to grasp objects in ways that afford comfortable or easy-to-control final postures; and...

People sometimes carry out voluntary movements that do not seem to be consciously controlled. A familiar example is the board game Ouija. We hypothesize that movement speed is a primary determinant of whether a movement is conscious or subconscious. In support of this hypothesis, we show that mean movement velocity is slower when subjects imagine “...

Models of information processing generally assume that stimuli are processed before actions are selected, at least in typical laboratory experiments where stimuli are presented and responses follow. In everyday life, however, there are generally fewer constraints on the ordering of decisions pertaining to stimuli and actions. This raises the questi...

Actions that are chosen have properties that distinguish them from actions that are not. Of the nearly infinite possible actions that can achieve any given task, many of the unchosen actions are irrelevant, incorrect, or inappropriate. Others are relevant, correct, or appropriate but are disfavored for other reasons. Our research focuses on the que...

Although most people prefer to use the right hand for unimanual tasks, it is unknown whether handedness arises from response bias. Whether it does is a question inspired by signal detection theory. We drew on the framework of signal detection theory to assess bias and sensitivity in hand choice by asking right-handers to choose between two tasks-on...

This study joined two approaches to motor control. The first approach comes from cognitive psychology and is based on the idea that goal postures and movements are chosen to satisfy task-specific constraints. The second approach comes from the principle of motor abundance and is based on the idea that control of apparently redundant systems is asso...

The time spent choosing between temporally extended behaviors cannot, in general, last as long as the behaviors themselves; otherwise, the tiger on your tail would have you for lunch. Previous reaction time studies provide little information on this topic, which was explored in the study reported here by showing participants images of scenes for wh...

Vaesen asks whether goal maintenance and planning ahead are critical for innovative tool use. We suggest that these aptitudes may have an evolutionary foundation in motor planning abilities that span all primate species. Anticipatory effects evidenced in the reaching behaviors of lemurs, tamarins, and rhesus monkeys similarly bear on the evolutiona...

Early research on visual imagery led investigators to suggest that mental visual images are just weak versions of visual percepts. Later research helped investigators understand that mental visual images differ in deeper and more subtle ways from visual percepts. Research on motor imagery has yet to reach this mature state, however. Many authors ha...

Although psychology is the science of mental life and behavior, little attention has been paid to the means by which mental life is translated into behavior. One domain in which links between cognition and action have been explored is the manipulation of objects. This article reviews psychological research on this topic, with special emphasis on th...

Background / Purpose: Prior to performing a physical action in the environment, decisions must be made to select one from multiple potential actions and then from multiple ways of performing it. One of the chief factors involved in such decisions is the effort required to perform the action. Noting that effort can be difficult to measure; Rosenba...

Etiquette, the customary code of polite behavior among members of a group, provides a means of conveying respect for others, but what is the basis for etiquette's unwritten rules? Here we show that one form of etiquette, holding a door open for another person, reflects the door holder's expectation that the person for whom he or she holds the door...

In this paper we review our theory of posture‐based motion planning, which emphasizes the fact that a single action may be governed by a number of simultaneous constraints and that motion planning is hierarchical with initial emphasis on the determination of goal postures. We critically review the development of the theory and summarize the sources...

Behavioral ecology is a field in which scientists try to predict behavioral choices, typically by estimating costs of behavioral alternatives even though those costs may involve different currencies. Researchers interested in motor behavior often have similar concerns, though the connections between these two fields have been largely unnoticed. The...

This chapter discusses the motor neuroscience that is a dynamic field. The central aim of motor neuroscience is to understand how the physical makeup of the nervous system and musculoskeletal system allows for the adaptive control of posture and movement. Specialized mechanisms allow motor control to be carried out in such a way that attention to t...

This chapter considers new paths of investigation that integrate motor as well as non-motor activities and provides a glimpse of new advances in theorizing about human motor control as well as relevant innovations in genetics and technology. One theoretical approach to human motor control has taken the form of dynamical systems theory. Here, the ai...

This chapter explains that faces and facial expressions are recognized from birth and can be remembered for years. Movements of the face are especially important for conveying different emotions. Despite the importance of smiling and other facial activities for social communication, the control of facial expression has been one of the least studied...

This chapter deals with the drawing and writing that is mainly used for the expression of thoughts to others. Writing and drawing may be controlled through a series of stages—from ideas to graphic segments to motor commands. A demonstration of the validity of the stage model is the preservation of writing styles across different means of writing. T...

According to Fitts' Law, the time (MT) to move to a target is a linear function of the logarithm of the ratio between the target's distance and width. Although Fitts' Law accurately predicts MTs for direct movements, it does not accurately predict MTs for indirect movements, as when an obstacle intrudes on the direct movement path. To address this...

People pick up objects in ways that reflect prospective as well as retrospective control. Prospective control is indicated by planning for end-state comfort such that people grasp a cylinder to be rotated or translated with a hand orientation or at a height that affords a comfortable final posture. Retrospective control is indicated when people reu...

We studied whether motor-control constraints for grasping objects that are moved to new positions reflect a rigid constraint hierarchy or a flexible constraint hierarchy. In two experiments, we asked participants to move two plungers from the same start locations to different target locations (both high, both low, or one high and one low). We found...

Event timing is manifested when participants make discrete movements such as repeatedly tapping a key. Emergent timing is manifested when participants make continuous movements such as repeatedly drawing a circle. Here we pursued the possibility that providing salient perceptual events to mark the completion of time intervals could allow circle dra...

Humans (Homo sapiens) anticipate the consequences of their forthcoming actions. For example, they grasp objects with uncomfortable grasps to afford comfortable end positions-the end-state comfort (ESC) effect. When did such sophisticated motor planning abilities emerge in evolution? We addressed this question by asking whether humans' most distant...

A number of studies have demonstrated regularities in how individuals select and perform single object manipulations, but little work has been concerned with the manipulation of multiple objects. To this end, the authors asked participants to stack a set of linearly spaced containers onto various goal locations. Our aim was to determine whether par...

Motor Control is a complex process that involves the brain, muscles, limbs, and often external objects. It underlies motion, balance, stability, coordination, and our interaction with others and technology. This book is a comprehensive introduction to motor control, covering a complex topic in an approachable way encompassing the psychological, phy...

Motor Control is a complex process that involves the brain, muscles, limbs, and often external objects. It underlies motion, balance, stability, coordination, and our interaction with others and technology. This book is a comprehensive introduction to motor control, covering a complex topic in an approachable way encompassing the psychological, phy...

Walking down stairs is a challenging perceptual-motor activity, as indicated by the large number of documented falls on stairs each year. The present study suggests that descending stairs is also a challenging memorial activity. A total of 147 people were videotaped as they descended a staircase. When the walkers were in the middle of the stairs, t...

Qualitative and quantitative changes characterize locomotion and rhythmic interlimb coordination at different speeds. Legs and hands do not move more or less quickly; they also adopt different relative coordination patterns. In the present article, the authors asked whether similar transitions occur for unimanual hand movements when speed is slowed...

In the early days of research on visual imagery, it was believed that visual images are like pictures in one's head. Only as the field matured did it come to be appreciated that visual images do not bear a first-order isomorphic relation to visual percepts. Now that the early days of research on motor imagery are coming to an end, it is important t...

Moving around obstacles requires balancing the need to avoid collisions with the need to minimize biomechanical costs. We investigated this tradeoff by studying the effects of visual uncertainty, motor noise, and practice on clearance over obstacles in a manual positioning task. Participants moved a manipulandum back and forth over a stationary obs...

Motor planning has generally been studied in situations where participants carry out physical actions without a particular purpose. Yet in everyday life physical actions are usually carried out for higher-order goals. We asked whether two previously discovered motor planning phenomena--the end-state comfort effect and motor hysteresis--would hold u...

M. J. Spivey, M. Grosjean, and G. Knoblich showed that in a phonological competitor task, participants' mouse cursor movements showed more curvature toward the competitor item when the competitor and target were phonologically similar than when the competitor and target were phonologically dissimilar. Spivey et al. interpreted this result as eviden...

We describe the results of recent studies inspired by the posture-based motion planning theory (Rosenbaum et al., 2001). The research concerns analyses of human object manipulation, obstacle avoidance, three-dimensional movement generation, and haptic tracking, the findings of which are discussed in relation to whether they support or fail to suppo...

Surprisingly little is known about how people plan and control everyday physical actions, such as walking along and picking up objects. In order to explore this topic, we conducted an experiment in which university students were asked to pick up a common object (a child's beach bucket) that stood on a table several meters from the participant's sta...

In the last decade, there has been a tremendous surge of research on the mechanisms of human action. This volume brings together this new knowledge in a single, concise source, covering most if not all of the basic questions regarding human action: what are the mechanisms by which action plans are acquired, mentally represented, activated, selected...

The dorsal, action-related, visual stream has been thought to have little or no memory. This hypothesis has seemed credible because functions related to the dorsal stream have been generally unsusceptible to priming from previous experience. Tests of this claim have yielded inconsistent results, however. We argue that these inconsistencies may be d...

Although researchers generally accept the proposition that movement costs are taken into account in the planning of voluntary movements, there is no established psychophysical method for estimating such costs. The authors tested and introduce a possible method. Participants were given every possible pair of tasks from a set of tasks that varied alo...

How people take hold of objects depends on what they plan to do with them. Such anticipatory effects reflect motor planning. One class of such anticipatory effects is the end-state comfort effect, a tendency to take hold of an object in an awkward way to permit a more comfortable, or more easily controlled, final position. Here we asked whether the...

The way human adults grasp objects is typically influenced by their knowledge of what they intend to do with the objects. This influence is reflected in the end-state comfort effect: Actors adopt initially uncomfortable postures to accommodate later task demands. Although many experiments have demonstrated this effect, to the best of our knowledge...

Previous research suggests that motor equivalence is achieved through reliance on effector-independent spatiotemporal forms. Here the authors report a series of experiments investigating the role of such forms in the production of movement sequences. Participants were asked to complete series of arm movements in time with a metronome and, on some t...

In a prescient paper Karl Lashley (1951) rejected reflex chaining accounts of the sequencing of behavior and argued instead for a more cognitive account in which behavioral sequences are typically controlled with central plans. An important feature of such plans, according to Lashley, is that they are hierarchical. Lashley offered several sources o...

In this study we asked whether Fitts' Law, a well-established relationship that predicts movement times (MTs) for direct movements between two positions, could be extended to predict MTs for curved, obstacle avoiding, movements. We had participants make movements in the presence of an obstacle. Using these data, we tested an extensions of Fitts' La...

Previous studies of object manipulation have suggested that when participants return an object to the place from which they just carried it, they tend to grasp the object for the target-back-to-home trips close to where they just grasped it for the home-to-target trips [Exp Brain Res 157(4):486-495, 2004; Psychon Bull Rev, 2006]. What was unclear f...

According to a prominent theory of human perception and performance (M. A. Goodale & A. D. Milner, 1992), the dorsal, action-related stream only controls visually guided actions in real time. Such a system would be predicted to show little or no action priming from previous experience. The 3 experiments reported here were designed to determine whet...

Taking a cue from recent discoveries of directional bias in microsaccades during visual fixation, we investigated directional bias in tremor during manual pointing. Subjects memorized and then performed patterns of alternating postures and voluntary movements. The directions of the tiny movements occurring during periods of intended stillness were...

Although locomotion and prehension are commonly coordinated in everyday life, little previous research has focused on this form of coordination. To address this neglected topic, we asked participants to stand a variable distance from a table, walk up to the table, and move an object on the tabletop to a new tabletop position, either to the right or...

Behavioral scientists use computers in virtually all their work-from data collection to analysis, presentation, and simulation. However, there has been no book written to date specifically for behavioral scientists on how to program with a general-purpose programming language. MATLAB for Behavioral Scientists is a tremendously valuable textbook tha...

Despite the great amount of research that has been done regarding the time it takes to move the hand to targets of varying distances and widths, it is unclear whether target distance and width are both represented in movement plans prior to movement initiation. We addressed this question by studying performance in an object manipulation task. Our p...

This study shows that in a novel task-bimanual haptic tracking-neurologically normal human adults can move their 2 hands independently for extended periods of time with little or no training. Participants lightly touched buttons whose positions were moved either quasi-randomly in the horizontal plane by 1 or 2 human drivers (Experiment 1), in circl...

How to represent and plan movement in the face of the articulatory redundancy of the skeletal system is a central challenge for understanding how physical actions are organized. By emphasizing the role of the goal posture as a representational primitive of the skeletal system, the posture-based model of movement planning provides one means for tran...

Definition The aim of models in motor control is to reproduce experimental data and to make predictions for new experiments, where different models make different predictions so as to discriminate between various models for human movement control. Typically, models have been developed for different levels of motor control: for specific parts of the...

Actions carried out in response to exogenous stimuli and actions selected endogenously on the basis of intentions were compared in terms of their behavioral (movement timing) and electrophysiological (EEG) profiles. Participants performed a temporal bisection task that involved making left or right key presses at the midpoint between isochronous pa...

Through the lens of prehension research, we consider how motor planning is influenced by people's perception of, and their intentions for how to act in, the environment. We review some noteworthy prehension phenomena, including a number of studies from our own labs which demonstrate the end-state comfort effect, the discovery of sequential effects...