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Adapting to Unusual Sensory Environments
Jennifer Sweeton
Principal Investigator: Dr. Robert Welch
Conducting research at NASA Ames was one of the highlights of my summer with the Academy. The project I conducted with Dr. Welch, “Adapting to Unusual Sensory Environments,” examined how humans adapt to prismed environments. Because adaptation to new environments is generally the same in all situations (the process of adaptation is universal), researchers can create unusual environments to test and determine what factors inhibit or facilitate adaptation. In this study had participants adapted to a prismed environment, since this is a much easier environment to create than other astronaut-relevant situations such as a 0-Gravity environment. Our main goal was to determine whether a significant delay of visual feedback prevented subjects from adapting to the prisms.
Previous research has suggested that if a person cannot immediately see his or her hand when they point to a target while wearing prism goggles, they will never be able to adapt to the prisms (meaning that they will continue to misjudge where the target is and subsequently miss it). Participants who are allowed to see their hand immediately after pointing to a target while wearing the goggles, however, will eventually adapt and accurately point to the target. This finding indicates that a delay of visual feedback is a variable that can inhibit, or even prevent, adaptation. Such a conclusion is relevant in part because it posits that we may never be able to adapt to using a robotic arm, where the movement a person creates is delayed after the instruction is given. However, Dr. Welch and I wondered if this finding was due to the nature of the experimental task instead of the delay of visual feedback. Thus, we designed a study where participants pointed at targets while wearing prism goggles, but altered other variables that we believed might be responsible for the previous findings.
Analyses showed that participants were able to adapt after a long (five second) delay of visual feedback. This finding sheds light on the complexity of adaptation; it is not that a delay of visual feedback alone inhibits adaptation. Rather, it is likely that several factors differentially affect adaptation. Each of these variables needs to be identified and explored.
During the first couple of weeks of my time here at Ames, I was assigned extensive reading on adaptation to prepare me for the project. I learned about previous research that discussed the limitations of human adaptation, and read about the importance of adapting to new environments. When this was completed, Dr. Welch and I worked together to determine what experiment I would conduct as my independent project. When the topic was decided we worked to finalize the procedure of the study, and made the necessary adjustments to the experiment apparatus.
To complete the study I ran twenty-two participants (two more than needed in case something went wrong), and then measured and entered all data. The study has been successfully completed, and Dr. Welch and I are currently finishing the statistical analyses on the data and preparing for another study study.
The results of the experiment are promising, so we are very excited about exploring this topic further. This fall we will be completing a related follow-up study, and plan to submit the data for publication. I am a student at Stanford University who lives nearby, so I have the ability to continue working on projects with Dr. Welch after the Academy. Because I have found the research being conducted at Ames to be very exciting, I plan to conduct more human factors studies in the future!
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