Elsevier

Human Movement Science

Volume 56, Part B, December 2017, Pages 54-70
Human Movement Science

Full Length Article
Recalibration in functional perceptual-motor tasks: A systematic review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.humov.2017.10.020Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Participants recalibrated similarly to both disturbances in perception and action.

  • Active exploration was only sufficient when the relevant information was available.

  • Recalibration time also seems to depend on the magnitude of the disturbance effect.

  • When information was restricted this resulted in slower or incomplete recalibration.

Abstract

Skilled actions are the result of a perceptual-motor system being well-calibrated to the appropriate information variables. Changes to the perceptual or motor system initiates recalibration, which is the rescaling of the perceptual-motor system to informational variables. For example, a professional baseball player may need to rescale their throws due to fatigue. The aim of this systematic review is to analyse how recalibration can and has been measured and also to evaluate the literature on recalibration. Five databases were systematically screened to identify literature that reported experiments where a disturbance was applied to the perceptual-motor system in functional perceptual-motor tasks. Each of the 91 experiments reported the immediate effects of a disturbance and/or the effects of removing that disturbance after recalibration. The results showed that experiments applied disturbances to either perception or action, and used either direct or indirect measures of recalibration. In contrast with previous conclusions, active exploration was only sufficient for fast recalibration when the relevant information source was available. Further research into recalibration mechanisms should include the study of information sources as well as skill expertise.

Introduction

Imagine you are a major league baseball pitcher expected to throw a strike ball each time you pitch. Halfway through the game your arm is getting slightly fatigued but you are expected to keep throwing your pitches. Your next throw may be a little off or outside the strike zone but you soon find the right adjustments and throw the ball accurately again. “Getting used to the fatigue” includes the rescaling of both the perceptual and the motor system and this process is known as recalibration (Withagen and Michaels, 2004, Withagen and Michaels, 2007). The aim of this systematic review is to analyse how recalibration can and has been measured and also to evaluate the literature on recalibration.

In the present review, recalibration has been defined in the context of the ecological approach. According to this approach, people directly detect the useful information available in the environment to guide their actions (Gibson, 1979). The proposal is that people do not detect the intrinsic properties of objects, but rather the informational variables that are specified by actions. That is to say, the information that is available in the environment is directly useful to guide the actions performed. In the context of ecological psychology, the accuracy of actions can be improved using attunement, calibration, and recalibration which we will define next (Jacobs et al., 2012, Michaels and Carello, 1981, Withagen and Michaels, 2004).

From an ecological perspective, it has been proposed that during attunement, the person converges onto the most useful informational variable(s) that are available and can guide a successful action. Actions can be inaccurate because the person converged onto variables that are not optimal, meaning that they are not sufficiently specifying for a given action (Jacobs et al., 2012). However, through exploration, they may attune to those variables which result in consistently good performance (Michaels & Carello, 1981). For example, throwing to a target can be specified by variables that relate directly to the distance to the target such as the angle of elevation or declination (de Oliveira et al., 2009, Ooi et al., 2001). The attunement process by which people gradually change from detecting less useful to more specifying variables is also referred to as education of attention (Gibson, 1963, Gibson and Gibson, 1955, Jacobs et al., 2012). Attunement on its own may not always be sufficient because calibration is also required for actions to be successful (Withagen & Michaels, 2004).

Calibration is the second process involved in improving the accuracy of actions. From an ecological perspective, calibration is defined as the scaling of action to the perceptual information (Withagen & Michaels, 2004). Having attuned to using certain informational variables the person needs, subsequently, to scale their perception-action link to these informational variables. This calibration is only possible through practice and it is what maintains the appropriate relation between the informational variable and the perception or action (e.g., Jacobs and Michaels, 2006, Withagen and Michaels, 2002, Withagen and Michaels, 2004). In spite of important differences, the term calibration has often been used interchangeably with recalibration, including the only review on [re]calibration by Van Andel, Cole, and Pepping (2017). Calibration and recalibration may have been used interchangeably, because they are thought to be similar processes of scaling information to perception and action. However, the distinction is important, because they differ in terms of: a) what may elicit these processes; b) how long they may take to complete the process; c) what methods should be used to investigate them; and d) practical implications when calibration or recalibration are thought to underlie poor performance.

Recalibration happens only after a disturbance in either perception or action renders the perception-action link inaccurate, thereby initiating the rescaling of that link (rearrangement). For example, when a player’s throwing requires an updated scaling of the perceptual-motor coupling due to fatigue. Recalibration is necessary to cope with different environments, using different tools, and coping with acute and long-term changes within the musculoskeletal system. Recalibration has been thought to largely depend on exploration (Withagen and Michaels, 2004, Withagen and Michaels, 2007) and a recent review concluded that even minimal movements may be sufficient for recalibration (Van Andel et al., 2017). The authors stated that recalibration occurred rapidly when there was a good match between the action that required recalibration and the movements that participants were allowed to make during exploration (e.g., when exploring maximal braking capabilities by experiencing braking in a car). On the other hand, when movements were restricted recalibration took longer. These conclusions were based on 4 articles and applied only to changes in action capabilities, so it is unclear whether the authors’ generalization is warranted. Another review studied only changes in perception and consequent recalibration using prism glasses (Redding, Rossetti, & Wallace, 2005). They studied recalibration in a three-step process: a pre-exposure baseline, an active exposure to the prism glasses, and a post-exposure after-effect. In the present systematic review, we will review recalibration by including experiments that studied changes in both perception and action and we also include all the stages relevant for the study of recalibration.

Recalibration is a dynamic process that can be captured and measured at different points in time. Schematically, recalibration consists of five different measurable stages that can be useful to guide research into the process of recalibration. We propose Fig. 1 as an illustration of the recalibration process (extended from Redding et al. (2005)). It includes a (1) baseline where the perception-action coupling is calibrated for a given task. Measurement at baseline is crucial to establish that the skill is well-calibrated. A (2) disturbance in the perception-action coupling where performance is affected. This can be a disturbance directed at the action system or the perceptual system. After this, the (3) rearrangement period consists of rescaling perception and action to information. During this period performance can be measured trial-by-trial to capture for example whether recalibration is gradual or sudden. At (4) removal the disturbance is withdrawn and performance is affected again (often known as after-effect). The (5) post-rearrangement period consists of rescaling perception and action back to baseline levels. Again, trial-by-trial measurements can ascertain the time course of this stage. Different studies have measured different stages of this model. For example, Scott and Gray (2010) focused on measuring the disturbance and rearrangement of perception-action to study recalibration. In their study, participants used either a standard, lighter or heavier bat to swing at a simulated approaching baseball. During the first couple of trials, significant differences were found in baseball swings between the three bat conditions (disturbance). The lighter group rearranged within five pitches and the heavier group rearranged within 10 pitches. After 30 trials, differences between the three groups were not significant, hence rearrangement was complete. Alternatively, Kunz, Creem-Regehr, and Thompson (2015) took measurements at the baseline and removal to study recalibration. Participants walked through a visually faster or a visually slower hallway (disturbance). After removal of this visual disturbance, they measured an after-effect whereby participants overshot distance in the visually slower condition and undershot distance in the visually faster condition.

An additional strategy used to study the concept of recalibration is to investigate whether the rearrangement of the perception-action coupling for one action transfers to another action. In studying how the transfer of recalibration is organised, Rieser, Pick, Ashmead, and Garing (1995) found that the rearrangement of walking transferred to side-stepping which served the same functional goal but did not transfer to throwing. The authors argued that this type of functional organisation is most efficient because recalibrating one action to a particular environmental situation generalises to other actions which may be used to accomplish the same goal (Rieser et al., 1995). On the other hand, Bingham, Pan, and Mon-Williams (2014) studied anatomical recalibration which had also been proposed by Rieser et al. (1995). Bingham et al. (2014) argued that the transfer of recalibration should also be anatomical because there are often anatomical differences between limbs (e.g., one arm shorter than the other). They proposed that where the anatomy of limbs is different, the recalibration of actions by one limb should affect the other limb (Bingham et al., 2014).

The aim of this systematic review is to analyse how recalibration can and has been measured and also to evaluate the literature on perceptual-motor recalibration. Although previous reviews have been published on the topic of recalibration, they have not 1) addressed the methodological strategies used in those studies and 2) have been restrictive in terms of type of disturbance included. In this connection, there are two reviews worth mentioning. The first is a recent review by Van Andel et al. (2017) who studied disturbances to action capabilities only; they concluded that active exploration was necessary for [re]calibration and that there was no research on older populations. The second review, by Redding et al. (2005), studied only disturbances to perception using prism glasses. Currently no review has focused on experiments that included disturbances applied to both the perceptual and the motor systems. This is important because the concept of recalibration entails the recoupling of perception and action based on information. Therefore, if we find that recalibration is essentially different depending on which system is primarily affected by the disturbance, this has implications for the concept of recalibration. Currently there is no information available regarding the methods, measures and results across these disturbances. Therefore, this systematic review studies disturbances that are applied to both the perceptual and the motor systems in functional perceptual-motor tasks. The analysis of these experiments focusses on how recalibration can and has been measured, and on evaluating the literature on recalibration.

Section snippets

Search strategy

An extensive literature search was performed using the following electronic databases: Medline, Web of Science, Scopus, SportDiscus and PsycInfo. The following search terms were used: [perceptual-motor OR ecological psychology] AND [movement OR locomotion OR exercise OR action] AND [calibrat∗ OR recalibrat∗ OR adapt∗ OR readapt∗ OR scale OR rescale OR scaling]. The search was performed on all available literature up to December 2016 and limited to experimental articles written in English. The

Descriptive statistics

The number of studies on recalibration has steadily grown over the years after the first articles were published in 1985. Most recalibration studies were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (39%), followed by Experimental Brain Research (17%) and Ecological Psychology (16%). Half of the recalibration articles reported multi-experimental articles (55%) with two or more experiments. Only 29 % of the studies measured recalibration at 3 or more

Discussion

The aim of this systematic review was to analyse how recalibration can and has been measured and also to evaluate the literature on recalibration. In summary, our results showed that participants recalibrated to disturbances in both perception and action in similar ways. Active exploration was sufficient for fast recalibration only when the relevant information source was available and the skill had been well-learned. When information was restricted this resulted in slower or incomplete

Funding

This work was supported by London South Bank University under the Building our Environment Grant.

Author’s note

Preliminary results of this study were presented at the European Workshop on Ecological Psychology July 2016.

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