Prof. Ivry’s research program examines various aspects of human performance with an emphasis on how people select, plan, and execute movements. A major theme in his recent work has been to explore the interaction of multiple systems in the course of sensorimotor control and learning. For example, he has developed methods to identify the contribution of explicit and implicit processes in sensorimotor learning, and linked these processes to specific neural systems through his work with patients with neurological disorders. To date, this work has focused on characterizing general principles and constraints of these learning systems and their interaction, focusing on analyses at the group level.
While at UBC, Prof. Ivry is interested in expanding this line of work, to ask how performance is influenced by contextual factors such as the emotional and physical state of the individual,or the social context in which the action is performed or learned. Prof. Ivry plans to apply the analytic tools and computational models developed in his lab to explore the specific mechanisms impacted by these variables. Prof. Ivry will be hosted by Drs. Alan Kingstone and Lara Boyd. He is also collaborating with Dr. Romeo Chua in the School of Kinesiology.
Alan Kingstone
Wall Associate
Research interests include cognitive ethology, social attention, extended reality, brain and human behaviour.
Dr. Kingstone is Director of the Brain, Attention and Reality (BAR) Lab. He says, “we aim to connect our attention research with the people and the world around us. We do this by asking questions that we believe relate directly to people as social animals, often taking account of the fact that many of us live in a technological world. We are always looking for fun and interesting lines of research, as well as new ways of studying human behaviour, social attention and the brain.”
The lab’s multidisciplinary research program includes work with children, patients, and healthy adults using a variety of techniques (e.g. natural observation, eye tracking, brain imaging, body motion tracking) aimed at answering questions ranging from basic aspects of visual attention to more complex aspects of social cognition.
