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280
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Introduction
Herbert Heuer is emeritus of the Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors. Most of his research is/was on human performance (motor control and learning, perception, action), some studies also on occupational health.
Additional affiliations
March 2014 - May 2023
March 2014 - present
April 1991 - February 2014
Publications
Publications (280)
Combining multisensory cues is fundamental for perception and action, and reflected by two frequently-studied phenomena: multisensory integration and sensory recalibration. In the context of audio-visual spatial signals, these are exemplified by the ventriloquism effect and its aftereffect. The ventriloquism effect occurs when the perceived locatio...
The brain engages the processes of multisensory integration and recalibration to deal with discrepant multisensory signals. These processes consider the reliability of each sensory input, with the more reliable modality receiving the stronger weight. Sensory reliability is typically assessed via the variability of participants' judgments, yet these...
Studies on multisensory perception often focus on simplistic conditions in which one single stimulus is presented per modality. Yet, in everyday life, we usually encounter multiple signals per modality. To understand how multiple signals within and across the senses are combined, we extended the classical audio‐visual spatial ventriloquism paradigm...
Modifications of imagined sensory consequences will not benefit overt performance when they cannot be transformed into motor outflow that produces them. With physical practice, the acquisition of internal models of motor transformations is largely based on prediction errors that are absent in imagery practice. What can imagery practice nevertheless...
In many tasks humans can trade speed against accuracy. This variation of strategy has different consequences for congruency effects in different conflict tasks. Recently, Mittelstädt et al. (2022) suggested that these differences are related to the dynamics of congruency effects as assessed by delta plots. With increasing delta plots in the Eriksen...
Multisensory integration and recalibration are two processes by which perception deals with discrepant signals. Both are often studied in the spatial ventriloquism paradigm. There, integration is probed by the presentation of discrepant audio-visual stimuli, while recalibration manifests as an aftereffect in subsequent judgements of unisensory soun...
Perceptual coherence in the face of discrepant multisensory signals is achieved via the processes of multisensory integration, recalibration and sometimes motor adaptation. These supposedly operate on different time scales, with integration reducing immediate sensory discrepancies and recalibration and motor adaptation reflecting the cumulative inf...
Studies on multisensory perception often focus on simplistic conditions where one signal is presented per modality. Yet, in everyday life we encounter multiple signals per modality that may be associated with each other. Using the spatial ventriloquism paradigm as model, we tested how the presence of two visual stimuli shapes sound location judgeme...
Perception engages the processes of integration, recalibration and sometimes motor adaptation to deal with discrepant multisensory stimuli. These processes supposedly deal with sensory discrepancies on different time scales, with integration reducing immediate ones and recalibration and motor adaptation reflecting the cumulative influence of their...
Information about the position of our hand is provided by multisensory signals that are often not perfectly aligned. Discrepancies between the seen and felt hand position or it's movement trajectory engage the processes of i) multisensory integration, ii) sensory recalibration, and iii) motor adaptation, which adjust perception and behavioral respo...
The dynamics of congruency effects in conflict tasks can be analyzed by means of delta plots which depict the reaction-time differences between incongruent and congruent conditions across the quantiles of the reaction-time distributions. Delta plots exhibit a variety of different shapes. Here we test the hypothesis that staggered onsets of processi...
Multisensory integration and recalibration are two processes by which perception deals with discrepant multisensory signals. In the lab, integration can be probed via the presentation of simultaneous spatially discrepant audio-visual stimuli, i.e. in a spatial ventriloquism paradigm. Recalibration here manifests as an aftereffect bias in unisensory...
To organize the plethora of sensory signals from our environment into a coherent percept, our brain relies on the processes of multisensory integration and sensory recalibration. We here asked how visuo-proprioceptive integration and recalibration are shaped by the presence of more than one visual stimulus, hence paving the way to study multisensor...
Previous research has shown that responses to words are faster and more accurate in the go/nogo version of the lexical-decision task (LDT) than in the choice-response version. This finding has been attributed to reduced response-selection demands in the go/nogo task. Here we test an alternative account assuming similar response-selection demands in...
Psychologische Forschung started as a journal “für Psychologie und ihre Grenzgebiete” and became strongly associated with the Berlin school of Gestalt psychology. Parallel to the fate of that school, the Journal was discontinued after 1938 and re-appeared only 1949. A number of years with variable and broad editorial boards and without a clear prof...
To organize the plethora of sensory signals from our environment into a coherent percept, our brain relies on the processes of multisensory integration and sensory recalibration. We here asked how visuo-proprioceptive integration and recalibration are shaped by the presence of more than one potentially relevant visual stimulus, hence paving the way...
The aim of the present research was to test if the fine-tuning of skilled motor actions benefits from proximate previous actions via a visuomotor calibration process. In professional darts, each player cycles through different activities: three darts are thrown with a rather smooth sequence of movements, the darts are retrieved from the dartboard,...
We examined the influence of extended exposure to a visuomotor rotation, which induces both motor adaptation and sensory recalibration, on (partial) multisensory integration in a cursor-control task. Participants adapted to a 30° (adaptation condition) or 0° (control condition) visuomotor rotation by making center-out movements to remembered target...
Successful computer use requires the operator to link the movement of the cursor to that of his or her hand. Previous studies suggest that the brain establishes this perceptual link through multisensory integration, whereby the causality evidence that drives the integration is provided by the correlated hand and cursor movement trajectories. Here,...
The brain integrates incoming sensory signals to a degree that depends on the signals’ redundancy. Redundancy—which is commonly high when signals originate from a common physical object or event—is estimated by the brain from the signals’ spatial and/or temporal correspondence. Here we tested whether verbally instructed knowledge of non-redundancy...
We analyzed the processing of go, nogo, and neutral stimuli by means of the interactions that arise when two stimuli are presented in temporal proximity. In Experiment 1, we tested four leaky, competing accumulator models of a flanker task with go and nogo targets and go, nogo, and neutral flankers. The models differed in whether they included a no...
We previously investigated sensory coupling of the sensed positions of cursor and hand in a cursor-control task and found differential characteristics of implicit and explicit measures of the bias of sensed hand position toward the position of the cursor. The present study further tested whether adaptation to a visuomotor rotation differentially af...
Adaptation to a visuomotor rotation in a cursor‐control task is accompanied by proprioceptive recalibration, whereas the existence of visual recalibration is uncertain and has even been doubted. In the present study, we tested both visual and proprioceptive recalibration; proprioceptive recalibration was not only assessed by means of psychophysical...
The brain generally integrates a multitude of sensory signals to form a unified percept. Even in cursor control tasks, such as reaching while looking at rotated visual feedback on a monitor, visual information on cursor position and proprioceptive information on hand position are partially integrated (sensory coupling), resulting in mutual biases o...
Spatial proximity enhances the sensory integration of exafferent position information, likely because it indicates whether the information comes from a single physical source. Does spatial proximity also affect the integration of position information regarding an action (here a hand movement) with that of its visual effect (here a cursor motion), t...
We tested the hypothesis that selective response preparation, based on reliable response cues, reduces response conflict in an Eriksen flanker task. Previous studies of this issue produced inconclusive results because presenting an always valid response cue before the stimulus display turns a choice-response task into a simple-response task, in whi...
The brain needs to identify redundant sensory signals in order to integrate them optimally. The identification process, referred to as causal inference, depends on the spatial and temporal correspondence of the incoming sensory signals ('online sensory causality evidence') as well as on prior expectations regarding their causal relation. We here ex...
Different features of objects can be associated with different responses, so that their concurrent presence results in conflict. The Simon effect is a prominent example of this type of response conflict. In two experiments, we ask whether it is modulated by the anatomical or spatial relation between responses. Predictions were derived from an exten...
In a cursor-control task, the sensed positions of cursor and hand are biased toward each other. We previously found different characteristics of implicit and explicit measures of the bias of sensed hand position toward the position of the cursor, suggesting the existence of distinct neural representations. Here we further explored differences betwe...
In a basic cursor-control task, the perceived positions of the hand and the cursor are biased towards each other. We recently found that this phenomenon conforms to the reliability-based weighting mechanism of optimal multisensory integration. This indicates that optimal integration is not restricted to sensory signals originating from a single sou...
The present study explored how response preparation modulates the effects of response conflict as induced by irrelevant flanker stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, an unreliable response cue (i.e., valid in 75% of trials but invalid in 25% of trials) preceded the stimulus display containing a target stimulus and different types (i.e., identical, neutr...
Humans are well able to operate tools whereby their hand movement is linked, via a kinematic transformation, to a spatially distant object moving in a separate plane of motion. An everyday example is controlling a cursor on a computer monitor. Despite these separate reference frames, the perceived positions of the hand and the object were found to...
The social psychological refractory period (PRP) effect refers to an increase in RT to the second of two successive stimuli when another person responds to the first stimulus (shared dual-task condition) rather than when a single person responds to both stimuli (individual dual-task condition). We investigated (a) whether a social PRP effect would...
Adaptation to sensorimotor transformations has received much attention in recent years. However, the role of motivation and its relation to the implicit and explicit processes underlying adaptation has been neglected thus far. Here, we examine the influence of extrinsic motivation on adaptation to a visuomotor rotation by way of providing financial...
Humans shape their environment more than any other species does, and the environment, in turn, shapes the profile of human skills. In spite of the general specificity of practice of sensorimotor skills, the waxing and waning of specific skills goes along with modulations of a broader range of skills or sensorimotor abilities. This is illustrated by...
In a cursor-control task in which the motion of the cursor is rotated randomly relative to the movement of the hand, the sensed directions of hand and cursor are mutually biased. In our previous study, we used implicit and explicit measures of the bias of sensed hand direction toward the direction of the cursor and found different characteristics....
The last several years have seen a number of approaches to robot assistance of motor learning. Experimental studies have produced a range of findings from beneficial effects through null-effects to detrimental effects of robot assistance. In this review we seek an answer to the question under which conditions which outcomes should be expected. For...
Adaptation to visuo-motor rotations embraces implicit and explicit components. We contrast this two-component model with a three-component model by means of an individual-differences approach. Adaptive changes were tested under four conditions: (1) closed-loop test, presence of the rotation cued (initial adaptive shift), (2) open-loop test, presenc...
Anticipatory adjustments to abrupt load changes are based on task-specific predictive information. The authors asked whether anticipatory adjustments to abrupt offsets of horizontal forces are related to expectancy. In two experiments participants held a position against an opposing force or moved against it. At force offset they had to stop rapidl...
Visuo-motor adaptation suffers at older working age. The age-related decline of behavioural adjustments is accompanied by reduced explicit knowledge of the visuo-motor transformation. It disappears when explicit knowledge is kept constant across the age range, except for particularly high levels of explicit knowledge. According to these findings, a...
We used variants of the Simon task to investigate whether repetitions and alternations in short keypress sequences are represented by spatial or relational codes. With spatial coding, either absolute or relative location would be used for coding the second response in a sequence. With relational coding, the second response would be coded in terms o...
Haptic guidance has been shown to have both facilitatory and interfering effects on motor learning. Interfering effects have been hypothesized to result from the particular dynamic environment, which supports a passive role of the learner, and they should be attenuated by fading guidance. Facilitatory effects, in particular for dynamic movement cha...
Standing postural control is known to be altered during aging, but age-related changes in sitting postural control have scarcely been explored. The present experiment studied the roles of visual and haptic information in a sitting task in both young and older adults. Fifteen young and fifteen older adults participated in this study. Six experimenta...
Sensorimotor representations of movement sequences are hierarchically organized. Here we test the effects of different stimulus modalities on such organizations. In the visual group, participants responded to a repeated sequence of visually presented stimuli by depressing spatially compatible keys on a response pad. In the auditory group, learners...
Longer lasting performance in cognitively demanding tasks leads to an exhaustion of cognitive resources and to a state commonly described as mental fatigue. More specifically, the allocation and focusing of attention become less efficient with time on task. Additionally, the selection of even simple responses becomes more error prone. With respect...
Haptic guidance has been shown to interfere with learning a novel visuo-motor rotation. Here, we ask whether this interference is specific to the learning of visuo-motor transformations or whether it is a more generalized phenomenon of learning spatial movement characteristics. Participants practiced to make movements at an angle of 75° relative to...
Electronic tools, such as a computer mouse, are highly flexible with respect to the visuo-motor transformations they implement. Different from mechanical tools, they lack mechanical transparency. Several studies noted difficulties of older users with computer-mouse operations, but also with more complex visuo-motor transformations as found in lapar...
Understanding the interactions of visual and proprioceptive information in tool use is important as it is the basis for learning of the tool's kinematic transformation and thus skilled performance. This study investigated how the CNS combines seen cursor positions and felt hand positions under a visuo-motor rotation paradigm. Young and older adult...
Visuo-motor adaptation suffers at older working age. The age-related decline of behavioral adjustments is accompanied by reduced explicit knowledge of the visuo-motor transformation. It disappears when explicit knowledge is kept constant across the age range, except for particularly high levels of explicit knowledge. According to these findings, at...
ABSTRACT Robotic guidance as a means to facilitate motor learning and rehabilitation has received considerable attention during the last few years. However, mixed outcomes suggest that the benefits might be restricted to certain movement characteristics. The authors investigate the effects of robotic guidance on different kinds of motor timing. Two...
For some types of visuo-motor transformations like large visuo-motor rotations or the complex transformation of a sliding first-order lever, distinct adaptive processes have been hypothesized that produce a rapid, discrete approximation of the transformation and a slow, graded fine tuning, respectively. Here we investigate whether part-task trainin...
The present study aimed to assess whether age-related differences in visuomotor adaptation are limited to the acquisition of explicit knowledge or extend to the application of the explicit knowledge in terms of deliberate strategic corrections. Old and young participants performed aiming movements, controlling a cursor on a computer screen with rot...
Extending the body with a tool could imply that characteristics of hand movements become characteristics of the movement of the effective part of the tool. Recent research suggests that such distal shifts are subject to boundary conditions. Here we propose the existence of three constraints: a strategy constraint, a constraint of movement character...
Discrimination of proprioceptive and visual spatial information is a prerequisite for the learning of visuo-motor transformations. This study investigated the individual's capability to discriminate the directions of seen cursor motions and felt hand movements under a visuo-motor rotation paradigm and its age-related variation. Young and older part...
In this paper we review and integrate a set of findings on learning the transformation of a sliding first-order lever, a type of tool with a prominent role in minimal access surgery. Its kinematic transformation is characterized by the so-called fulcrum effect, the inversion of the movement direction of the tip of the lever relative to that of the...
This chapter reveals that the ability to use complex tools or the expertise over complex visuomotor transformations can be investigated from applied and basic-research perspectives. It relies on the basic-research approach to address issues such as accuracy, transparency, awareness, aging, and representation of an existing idea in a new way. Invest...
Humans are highly efficient in moving in a world of variable resistive forces which result, e.g., from different masses of objects or different directions of movements relative to gravity. However, the underlying mechanisms are challenged when an opposing force is suddenly removed. The resulting involuntary movements are known as accident risks in...
The present study aimed to assess whether age-related differences in visuomotor adaptation are limited to the acquisition of explicit knowledge or extend to the application of the explicit knowledge in terms of deliberate strategic corrections. Old and young participants performed aiming movements, controlling a cursor on a computer screen with rot...
One of the fundamental concomitants of aging is generalized slowing of almost all motor and mental functions. The present study aimed to elucidate the generality of slowing across different sensorimotor tasks. Results show that although slowing can be found in many tasks, older adults perform faster in a tracing task compared to their younger count...
For the efficient use of tools, the visuo-motor transformation relating body movements to movements of the effective part of the tool has to be learned. Here we ask whether adaptation to a complex tool transformation generalizes to new regions of the workspace of the tool. Three groups of participants performed goal-directed movements of a cursor o...
Unlabelled:
The introduction of simulators for the practice of endoscopic-surgery sensori-motor skills opens a wide range of design options. An obvious one is augmented visual information early in practice, in particular a direct view of the site instead of the endoscopic view. We studied the effects of such augmented visual information on the sim...
Robotic guidance is an engineered form of haptic-guidance training and intended to enhance motor learning in rehabilitation, surgery, and sports. However, its benefits (and pitfalls) are still debated. Here, we investigate the effects of different presentation modes on the reproduction of a spatiotemporal movement pattern. In three different groups...
Previous research suggests that the acquisition of an internal model of a complex visuo-motor transformation might proceed as a progression of approximations. Here, we test this assumption by comparing performance of three groups of participants during practice and subsequent open-loop tests with three different types of visuo-motor transformation:...
Studies with perturbed and augmented haptic information during adaptation to novel visuo-motor transformations suggest that haptic information might be neglected. However, the notion of functional haptic neglect during adaptation is counterintuitive for different reasons. Therefore, we sought conditions where haptic guidance during adaptation resul...
Human movements are quickly adjusted to variations of inertial load. However, this adjustment does not always imply a full compensation, so that kinematic movement characteristics vary. The present experiment served to explore the consequences of a complex dynamic transformation, implemented by a sliding first-order lever, on the endpoint distribut...
We investigated the impact of enhanced mechanical transparency during practice on closed-loop performance as well as on the acquisition of an internal representation of the visuo-motor transformation of a lever. Three groups of participants controlled a cursor on a monitor by moving the effort arm of a sliding two-sided lever. The level of mechanic...
Haptic guidance by a robot is a recent technology to support motor learning. Its mechanisms and effects are not yet well understood. One of the hypotheses is that learning of temporal characteristics is particularly susceptible to the beneficial effects of robotic guidance. In this study we investigate the influence of robotic guidance on the produ...
We examined the generalization of adjustment to a visuomotor rotation across the workspace in younger and older adults. Participants practiced in the right workspace with a single target direction and were tested in both the right and left workspace with eight different target directions. A set of tests served to identify implicit and explicit comp...
The benefits of modern technologies such as personal computers, in-vehicle navigation systems, and electronic organizers are evident in everyday life. However, only recently has it been proposed that the increasing use of personal computers in producing written texts may significantly contribute to the loss of handwriting skills. Such a fundamental...
Voluntary movements embrace both intentional, conscious and post-intentional, largely automatic processes. Here, we examine these types of processes and the relations between them during preparation and execution of voluntary movements. First, a general overview is given about how intentional and post-intentional components are interleaved to enabl...
In two experiments we studied the role of active movements for adaptation to a visuo-motor rotation by way of adding external forces. In the first experiment we compared practice with target guidance and path guidance with a no-guidance control condition. With target guidance the arm was driven to the target on a straight path, whereas with path gu...
This study investigated the influence of the type of visual feedback during practice with a complex visuo-motor transformation of a sliding two-sided lever on the acquisition of an internal model of the transformation. Three groups of participants, who practised with different types of visual feedback, were compared with regard to movement accuracy...
Concurrent adaptation to two different visuomotor transformations has been shown to be possible as long as discriminative contextual cues are available. The authors examined explicit and implicit components of visually cued dual adaptation in younger and older adults. They found that only young adults, but not old adults, produced appropriate adapt...
Mechanical tools are transparent in the sense that their input-output relations can be derived from their perceptible characteristics. Modern technology creates more and more tools that lack mechanical transparency, such as in the control of the position of a cursor by means of a computer mouse or some other input device. We inquired whether an enh...
Humans have unique abilities in using tools. The skilled and goal-directed use of a tool implies that processes of motor control can be adjusted to the transformation of the movement of a part of the body into the movement of the effective part of the tool. A common example is the transformation of a hand movement in the motion of a cursor on a com...
Background:
Adjustment to a visuo-motor rotation is known to be affected by ageing. According to previous studies, the age-related differences primarily pertain to the use of strategic corrections and the generation of explicit knowledge on which strategic corrections are based, whereas the acquisition of an (implicit) internal model of the novel...
One of the fundamental concomitants of aging is generalized slowing of almost all motor and mental functions. The present study aimed to elucidate the generality of slowing across different sensorimotor tasks. Results show that although slowing can be found in many tasks, older adults perform faster in a tracing task compared to their younger count...
We studied adaptation to the visuo-motor transformation of a virtual and a real two-sided sliding lever. In a previous study (Sülzenbrück and Heuer in Exp Brain Res 195:153-165, 2009) we had found essentially no differences. However, adaptation had been restricted to a simplified symmetry approximation of the transformation. In the present study pr...
Movements in virtual stereoscopic space tend to be difficult and slow. To shed some light on the origins of these difficulties, we studied open-loop pointing with targets presented in a mirror stereoscope. Whilst targets were placed in a virtual horizontal plane, movement end-points were located in an inclined plane. The inclination of this plane w...
Age-related changes of adjustment to visuo-motor transformations were studied for a complex transformation modelled after those encountered in laparoscopic surgery. Movement times of aimed movements were initially almost identical for the two age groups and diverged in the course of practice. In test phases without visual feedback, no age-related v...
We examined age-related changes of executive functions by means of random noun generation. Consistent with previous observations on random letter generation, older participants produced more prepotent responses than younger ones. In the case of random noun generation, prepotent responses are nouns of the same category as the preceding noun. In cont...
Learning to operate a complex tool such as a sliding lever can be conceived as learning both a kinematic and a dynamic transformation. We investigated whether the presence of the dynamic transformation has an inhibitory or a facilitative effect on learning to control a sliding lever. Furthermore, we examined the characteristics of the internal mode...
The authors studied the trajectories of the hand and of the tip of a handheld sliding first-order lever in aiming movements. With this kind of tool, straight trajectories of the hand are generally associated with curved trajectories of the tip of the lever and vice versa. Trajectories of the tip of the lever exhibited smaller deviations from straig...
Adaptation to novel visuomotor transformations for example when navigating a cursor on a computer monitor by using a computer mouse, can be explicit or implicit. Explicit adjustments are made when people are informed about the occurrence and the type of a novel visuomotor transformation and intentionally modify their movements. Implicit adjustments...
Consistent with the widely accepted notion of separate specification of movement amplitude and direction, it has been argued that there is also a categorical difference between adaptation to novel visuomotor rotations and to novel visuomotor gains. In line with this view, ageing seems to affect rotation and gain adaptation differently in that age-r...
Among the classic problems of the physiology and psychology of work are the origins and consequences of fatigue (LUCZAK 1983,
SCHMIDTKE 1965). Modern types of work with a high information-processing load and an intensive use of keyboards are often
associated with different kinds of central and peripheral fatigue (ROHMERT & LUCZAK 1973). A signature...
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