Assessment of human expertise and movement kinematics in first-person shooter games.

In contrast to traditional professional sports, there are few standardized metrics in professional esports (competitive multiplayer video games) for assessing a player's skill and ability. We assessed the performance of professional-level players in Aim Lab, a first-person shooter training and assessment game, with two target-shooting tasks. These tasks differed primarily in target size: the task with large targets provided an incentive to be fast but imprecise and the task with large targets provided an incentive to be precise but slow.

Exogenous attention facilitates perceptual learning in visual acuity to untrained stimulus locations and features.

Visual perceptual learning (VPL) refers to the improvement in performance on a visual task due to practice. A hallmark of VPL is specificity, as improvements are often confined to the trained retinal locations or stimulus features. We have previously found that exogenous (involuntary, stimulus-driven) and endogenous (voluntary, goal-driven) spatial attention can facilitate the transfer of VPL across locations in orientation discrimination tasks mediated by contrast sensitivity.

In search of exogenous feature-based attention.

Visual attention prioritizes the processing of sensory information at specific spatial locations (spatial attention; SA) or with specific feature values (feature-based attention; FBA). SA is well characterized in terms of behavior, brain activity, and temporal dynamics-for both top-down (endogenous) and bottom-up (exogenous) spatial orienting. FBA has been thoroughly studied in terms of top-down endogenous orienting, but much less is known about the potential of bottom-up exogenous influences of FBA.

Adjacent Features for High-Density EMG Pattern Recognition.

In the infancy of electromyography (EMG) based pattern recognition (PR) limited numbers of electrode channels were anatomically placed over muscles of interest. Modern methods have shown that regularly spaced electrodes around the circumference of a limb are equally effective and have been demonstrated in consumer-ready myoelectric control systems such as Thalmic Labs' Myo armband. In addition to linear arrays, grid arrays have also been applied in this field of research.

Endogenous spatial attention during perceptual learning facilitates location transfer.

Covert attention and perceptual learning enhance perceptual performance. The relation between these two mechanisms is largely unknown. Previously, we showed that manipulating involuntary, exogenous spatial attention during training improved performance at trained and untrained locations, thus overcoming the typical location specificity.

Simple space-domain features for low-resolution sEMG pattern recognition.

In recent years, low-cost, low-power myoelectric control systems such as the Myo armband from Thalmic Labs have become available and unlocked tremendous possibilities for myoelectric controlled applications. However, due to the embedded system constraints, such sEMG control devices typically samples sEMG signals at a lower frequency. It is in doubt whether existing sEMG feature extraction methods are still valid on such low-resolution sEMG data.

Spatial attention is necessary for object-based attention: Evidence from temporal-order judgments.

Attentional selection is a dynamic process that relies on multiple types of representations. That object representations contribute to attentional selection has been known for decades; however, most evidence for this contribution has been gleaned from studies that have relied on various forms of spatial cueing (some endogenous and some exogenous). It has thus remained unclear whether object-based attentional selection is a direct result of spatial cuing, or whether it still emerges without any spatial marker.

Exogenous attention facilitates location transfer of perceptual learning.

Perceptual skills can be improved through practice on a perceptual task, even in adulthood. Visual perceptual learning is known to be mostly specific to the trained retinal location, which is considered as evidence of neural plasticity in retinotopic early visual cortex. Recent findings demonstrate that transfer of learning to untrained locations can occur under some specific training procedures.