Hello! I am a post-doctoral researcher whose main interest is the interaction between action and perception.
We use our hands all the time to interact with objects. This requires fine finger movement and gives rich perceptual information to the many sensors in our hands. When we manipulate an object, we use sensory information to plan and control our movements. At the same time, we use our senses to perceive and recognise the object. We learn, for example, that a plastic cup is lighter than a glass one – we can then use this information to plan a movement the next time we grasp it.
I investigate how these perception and action systems are related, and how specific brain areas interact in order to control these processes.
In collaboration with dr. Guy Rens and prof. Marco Davare, a new preprint has just been put online. We investigated how contextual information can affect motor planning and activity in the motor cortex (corticospinal excitability). For example, if you have to increase your fingertip forces fast or slow, does your motor cortex know?
Our paper on ‘the effects of TMS over the anterior intraparietal area on anticipatory fingertip force scaling and the size–weight illusion’ can now be found online! We used TMS to show that a parietal brain area (aIPS) has a transient effect on how fingertip forces are adjusted to the size of an object. However, after one trial, this effect was gone, indicating that other areas take over the scaling of forces to object size. The size of an object also influences how heavy an object feels, but aIPS did not play a role in this size–weight illusion.
Today, a new preprint was published of a study in which I show that you can make corrections, even if object properties change after the initiation of the reaching movement. In addition, I show that corrections can be made based on visual, haptic, or visuohaptic information.
In my research I am interested in the interaction between action and perception. The ‘actions’ I investigate are hand movements. Our hands are very important to interact with our environment: we use them all the time to manipulate objects.
The manipulation of an object starts with grasping and lifting it. This might seem easy, but if we don’t want to squeeze a fragile object such as an egg, for example, we have to scale our fingertip forces and grip to the object properties. At the same time, we receive information about these properties by getting feedback from sensors in the skin. This is very useful if we have never touched the object before as it allows us to learn how to handle it.
To investigate how hand movements and fingertip forces are planned and controlled during grasping and lifting objects of different sizes and weights, I use precise motion tracking and force sensors. Furthermore, I examine how humans adjust their movements to new sensory information or multi-sensory conflicts. I also investigate the perception of objects by using psychophysical techniques, for instance, by asking participants how large or how heavy they think objects are. By comparing these measures, I study how these perceptual and motor effects are related to each other.
In addition, I am looking at which brain areas are involved in the control of these action and perceptual systems. I use transcranial magnetic stimulation to stimulate the brain and evaluate how this affects the control of movements and the perception of objects.
I have a background in Human Movement Sciences and in psychophysics (the study of perception). After I finished my bachelor Human Movement Sciences at VU Amsterdam in the Netherlands, I continued to master Human Movement Sciences at the same university. As part of my master, I performed a research internship in at the Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom. In this project, I studied the eye–hand coordination in pointing tasks.
After graduating, I started a PhD on haptic perception at Utrecht University and continued this position after two years at the VU Amsterdam. During these four years, I investigated the haptic saliency of object properties with haptic search tasks. If a property is salient, this means it is processed very efficiently. Therefore, it can be felt very easily and quickly. In addition, I looked at the exploration movements that are made when haptically searching for object properties.
I then moved to the KU Leuven in Belgium, where I explored the relations between action and perception in grasping movements. At the Motor Control and Neuroplasticity lab, I investigated the brain areas that are important in controlling action and perception systems. Since 2017, my research was funded by an FWO post-doctoral fellowship.
Since 2017, I am a member of the junior board of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience.
* indicates an equal contribution from authors.