Floris Tijmen Van VugtUniversité de Montréal | UdeM · Department of Psychology
Floris Tijmen Van Vugt
PhD
About
34
Publications
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Introduction
Hi, nice you’re here! I research how the way we perceive influences the way we act. And how perception is shaped by action. I use behavioural and neuroscientific tools to understand how sensory and motor systems in the brain interact, through studying motor learning in speech and music. Currently I am a post-doctoral researcher at McGill University.
Additional affiliations
September 2020 - present
March 2014 - present
October 2011 - November 2013
Publications
Publications (34)
Background
Studies on age differences in emotional states during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that older adults experienced greater emotional wellbeing compared to younger adults. We hypothesized these age differences to be related to the perception of closeness to family/friends or the engagement in daily activities during the pandemic.
Aim
To in...
Evidence from language, visual and sensorimotor learning suggests that training early in life is more effective. The present work explores the hypothesis that learning during sensitive periods involves distinct brain networks in addition to those involved when learning later in life. Expert pianists were tested who started their musical training ea...
Studies on age-related differences in risk perception in a real-world situation, such as the recent COVID-19 outbreak, showed that the risk perception of getting COVID-19 tends to decrease as age increases. This finding raised the question on what factors could explain risk perception in older adults. The present study examined age-related differen...
Synchronizing movements with an external periodic stimulus, such as tapping your foot along with a metronome, is a remarkable human skill called sensorimotor synchronization. A growing body of literature investigates this process, but experiments require collecting responses with high temporal reliability, which often requires specialized hardware....
Available here: https://rdcu.be/b8ZcD
Mounting evidence suggests that the cerebellum, a structure previously linked to motor function, is also involved in a wide range of non-motor processes. It has been proposed that the cerebellum performs the same computational processes in both motor and non-motor domains. Within motor functions, the cerebellu...
The earliest stages of sensorimotor learning involve learning the correspondence between movements and sensory results: a sensorimotor map. The present exploratory study investigated the neurochemical underpinnings of sensorimotor map acquisition by monitoring twenty-five participants as they acquired a new association between movements and sounds....
Music performance requires simultaneously producing challenging movement sequences with the left and right hand. A key question in bimanual motor control research is whether bimanual movements are produced by combining unimanual controllers or through a dedicated bimanual controller. Here, 34 expert pianists performed musical scale playing movement...
One of the puzzles of learning to talk or play a musical instrument is how we learn which movement produces a particular sound: an audiomotor map. The initial stages of map acquisition can be studied by having participants learn arm movements to auditory targets. The key question is what mechanism drives this early learning. Three learning processe...
Older adults are assumed to change their affect states in reaction to positive and negative stimuli across the life span. However, little is known about the impact of success and failure events on age-related changes in affect states and, particularly, in self-esteem levels. To fill this gap in the literature, in the present study changes in affect...
Recent studies using visuomotor adaptation and sequence learning tasks have assessed the involvement of working memory in the visuospatial domain. The capacity to maintain previously performed movements in working memory is perhaps even more important in reinforcement-based learning in order to repeat accurate movements and avoid mistakes. Using th...
The relationship between neural activation during movement training and the plastic changes that survive beyond movement execution is not well understood. Here we ask whether the changes in resting-state functional connectivity observed following motor learning overlap with the brain networks that track movement error during training. Human partici...
Sensorimotor learning requires knowledge of the relationship between movements and sensory effects: a sensorimotor map. Generally, these mappings are not innate but have to be learned. During learning, the challenge is to build a continuous map from a set of discrete observations, that is, predict locations of novel targets. One hypothesis is that...
One of the puzzles of learning to talk or play a musical instrument is how we learn which movement produces a particular sound: an audiomotor map. Existing research has used mappings that are already well learned such as controlling a cursor using a computer mouse. By contrast, the acquisition of novel sensorimotor maps was studied by having partic...
Purpose:
Learning to play musical instruments such as piano was previously shown to benefit post-stroke motor rehabilitation. Previous work hypothesised that the mechanism of this rehabilitation is that patients use auditory feedback to correct their movements and therefore show motor learning. We tested this hypothesis by manipulating the auditor...
Timing abilities are often measured by having participants tap their finger along with a metronome and presenting tap-triggered auditory feedback. These experiments predominantly use electronic percussion pads combined with software (e.g., FTAP or Max/MSP) that records responses and delivers auditory feedback. However, these setups involve unknown...
Leitgeb (2005) proposes a new approach to semantic paradoxes, based upon a direct definition of the set of grounded sentences in terms of dependence upon non-semantic state of affairs. In the present paper, we account for the extensional disagreement between this dependence approach and more familiar alethic approaches. In order to do so, we study...
Humans are capable of learning a variety of motor skills such as playing the piano. Performance of these skills is subject to multiple constraints, such as musical phrasing or speed requirements, and these constraints vary from one context to another. In order to understand how the brain controls highly skilled movements, we investigated pianists p...
Background: Music-supported therapy has been shown to be an effective tool for rehabilitation of motor deficits after stroke. A unique feature of music performance is that it is inherently social: music can be played together in synchrony.
Aim: The present study explored the potential of synchronized music playing during therapy, asking whether syn...
Task-specific focal dystonia is a movement disorder that is characterized by the loss of voluntary motor control in extensively trained movements. Musician's dystonia is a type of task-specific dystonia that is elicited in professional musicians during instrumental playing. The disorder has been associated with deficits in timing. In order to test...
The human brain is able to predict the sensory effects of its actions. But how precise are these predictions? The present research proposes a tool to measure thresholds between a simple action (keystroke) and a resulting sound. On each trial, participants were required to press a key. Upon each keystroke, a woodblock sound was presented. In some tr...
Auditory feedback is an auditory signal that contains information about performed movement. Music performance is an excellent candidate to study its influence on motor actions, since the auditory result is the explicit goal of the movement. Indeed, auditory feedback can guide online motor actions, but its influence on motor learning has been invest...
Making music on a professional level requires a maximum of sensorimotor precision. Chronotype-dependent fluctuations of sensorimotor precision in the course of the day may prove a challenge for musicians because public performances or recordings are usually scheduled at fixed times of the day. We investigated pianists' sensorimotor timing precision...
Whatever we do, we do it in our own way, and we recognize master artists by small samples of their work. This study investigates individuality of temporal deviations in musical scales in pianists in the absence of deliberate expressive intention. Note-by-note timing deviations away from regularity form a remarkably consistent "pianistic fingerprint...
Although subthalamic-deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) is an efficient treatment for Parkinson's disease (PD), its effects on fine motor functions are not clear. We present the case of a professional violinist with PD treated with STN-DBS. DBS improved musical articulation, intonation and emotional expression and worsened timing relative to a timeke...
We investigated how musical phrasing and motor sequencing interact to yield timing patterns in the conservatory students' playing piano scales. We propose a novel analysis method that compared the measured note onsets to an objectively regular scale fitted to the data. Subsequently, we segment the timing variability into (i) systematic deviations f...
In the present study, response trajectories were used in a picture–word conflict task to determine the timing of intermediate processing stages that are relatively inaccessible to response time measures. A marker was placed above or below the word ABOVE or BELOW so that its location was congruent or in conflict with the word's meaning. To report ei...
Projects
Projects (2)
The initial stages of motor skill acquisition are often modeled behaviorally using reinforcement learning in which one maximizes reward obtained from doing successful action. Motor exploration is an essential part of reinforcement learning to gather information about the task and the environment. This project will examine the neural underpinnings of reinforcement-based motor learning. In another section, I will also examine the unique roles of working memory during reinforcement learning using a relevant behaviour task.
