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Tom Stoffregen, Ph.D., professor in the School of Kinesiology and director of the Affordance Perceptual-Action Laboratory, was interviewed by the online publication PsyPost on his research relating to the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift. His study, conducted with Kinesiology Ph.D. student Justin Munafo and U of M undergraduate honors student Meg Diedrick, indicates that using the headset […]

Ruth Rath, Ph.D. student in Kinesiology,  and Michael Wade, Ph.D., professor in the School of Kinesiology, have written an article on posture and aging to be published in EBioMedicine, a journal that specializes in publishing research and commentary on translational medicine. The title of the article is, “The two faces of postural control in older adults: Stability […]

The cover story of the March 18 issue of Science News includes the latest research being conducted by Tom Stoffregen, Ph.D., professor in the School of Kinesiology and director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL). Stoffregen is quoted extensively on his work related to virtual reality, motion sickness, and the sex connection.  

Tom Stoffregen, Ph.D., professor in the School of Kinesiology, was interviewed about his research related to motion sickness and virtual reality for the March 18 edition of ScienceNews. A number of researchers believe that sensory mismatch is to blame for the motion sickness that can be present with virtual reality use, but Stoffregen believes that instability […]

Thomas Stoffregen, Ph.D., professor in the School of Kinesiology and director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL), has accepted an appointment to the editorial board for Gait & Posture, one of the pre-eminent journals in the field of Movement Science. The journal is a vehicle for the publication of up-to-date basic and clinical research on all aspects of locomotion […]

A study by Thomas Stoffregen, Ph.D., professor in the School of Kinesiology and director of the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL), along with Bruno Mantel and Benoit G. Bardy, has been accepted for publication in Ecological Psychology. The article is titled “The senses considered as one perceptual system.” While peer-reviewed, the article was invited as part of a special […]

Virtual environments such as those used in video games and driving/flight simulators are used for entertainment and training, but are often associated with visually induced motion sickness (VIMS). In this study, we asked whether passive restraint of the head and torso could reduce VIMS in younger and older adults. Twenty-one younger (18-35 years) and 16 older (65 + years) healthy adults engaged in a simulated driving task using a console video game while seated. On different days, participants...

Affordances are available behaviors that emerge out of relations between properties of animals and properties of their environment. Affordances are nested within one another. One way to conceptualize this nesting is through a mean-ends hierarchy. Previous research has shown that perceivers are sensitive to hierarchical means-ends relationships when perceiving affordances for their own actions. Affordances are also nested in a social context. We investigated perception of hierarchical mean-ends...

On land, the spatial magnitude of postural sway (i.e., the amount of sway) tends to be greater when participants look at the horizon than when they look at nearby targets. By contrast, on ships at sea, the spatial magnitude of postural sway in young adults has been greater when looking at nearby targets and less when looking at the horizon. Healthy aging is associated with changes in the movement patterns of the standing body sway, and these changes typically are interpreted in terms of...

Anecdotal reports suggest that motion sickness may occur among users of contemporary, consumer-oriented head-mounted display systems and that women may be at greater risk. We evaluated the nauseogenic properties of one such system, the Oculus Rift. The head-mounted unit included motion sensors that were sensitive to users' head movements, such that head movements could be used as control inputs to the device. In two experiments, seated participants played one of two virtual reality games for up...

Motion of the surface of the sea (waves, and swell) causes oscillatory motion of ships at sea. Generally, ships are longer than they are wide. One consequence of this structural difference is that oscillatory ship motion typically will be greater in roll (i.e., the ship rolling from side to side) than in pitch (i.e., the bow and stern rising and falling). For persons on ships at sea, affordances for walking on the open deck should be differentially influenced by ship motion in roll and pitch....

In studying the perception of affordances, researchers have typically identified a single affordance and designed experiments to evaluate the perception of that affordance. Yet in daily life, multiple affordances always exist. One consequence of this is that there may be higher order, means-ends relations between different affordances. In 4 experiments, we created situations in which lower order, subordinate affordances could affect the realization of higher order, superordinate affordances, and...

Research on affordances typically has focused on the identification and perception of a single affordance. However, in daily life, multiple affordances are available. We investigated potential hierarchical relations among affordances of tools in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants assembled a tool consisting of an L-shaped object and attached masses so as to perform a particular behavior on a target object-tipping over or sliding it-located at a particular distance from the...

The spatial magnitude of standing body sway is greater during viewing of more distant targets and reduced when viewing nearby targets. Classical interpretations of this effect are based on the projective geometry of changes in visual stimulation that are brought about by body sway. Such explanations do not motivate predictions about the temporal dynamics of body sway. We asked whether the distance of visible targets would affect both the spatial magnitude and the multifractality of standing body...

We exposed standing men and women to motion relative to the illuminated environment in a moving room. During room motion, we measured the kinematics of standing body sway. Participants were instructed to discontinue immediately if they experienced any symptoms of motion sickness, however mild. For this reason, our analysis of body sway included only movement before the onset of motion sickness. We analyzed the spatial magnitude of postural sway in terms of the positional variability and mean...

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Motion sickness is more common among women than among men. Previous research has shown that standing body sway differs between women and men. In addition, research has shown that postural sway differs between individuals who experience visually induced motion sickness and those who do not and that those differences exist before exposure to visual motion stimuli. We asked whether sex differences in postural sway would be related to sex differences in the incidence of visually induced motion...

CONCLUSIONS: Motion sickness induced using linear visual oscillatory stimuli exhibited sex differences greater than those that have been reported in field studies. Sex differences in motion sickness may vary as a function of the type of motion stimulation (linear versus angular).

CONCLUSIONS: We obtained direct evidence that ship motions in roll and pitch differentially affect the timing of stepping patterns in human gait. This novel finding motivates new research on quantitative parameters of gait at sea.

Body movement influences the structure of multiple forms of ambient energy, including optics and gravito-inertial force. Some researchers have argued that egocentric distance is derived from inferential integration of visual and non-visual stimulation. We suggest that accurate information about egocentric distance exists in perceptual stimulation as higher-order patterns that extend across optics and inertia. We formalize a pattern that specifies the egocentric distance of a stationary object...