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My principle interests are in bridging the gaps between laboratory-based studies of motor control and human performance "in the wild". To that end, I am interested in conducting translational research exploring the cognitive, affective, and motivational influences for optimizing training in rehabilitation and athletics. As a researcher, I am interested in the cognitive neuroscience of motor learning and human performance. Although expert performance has been studied in cognitive psychology for many years, there is still a lot we do not understand of the neural basis of skilled motor performance. Part of this lack of understanding is that many naturalistic studies of performance focus on behavioral measures of the performance outcome. On the other side of the question, neuroscientists have focused on very detailed studies of relatively simple skills. These laboratory tasks are good because they are amenable to detailed phyisiological analysis and brain-based hypothesis testing (e.g., fMRI gives exquisite imaging detail, but requires an artificial constraint of stationarity), but the degree of ecological validity is often unclear. At the University of Colorado, I work in the Center for Research on Training, the Institute for Cognitive Science, and the Center for Neuroscience under the direction of Dr. Alice Healy (website; Department of Psychology) and Dr. David Sherwood (website; Department of Integrative Physiology). Current Projects: The role of attention in motor learning and control: This line of research is the basis for my dissertation and explores how attention (directed either internally or externally) can improve motor learning and performance. In general, research has demonstrated that focusing externally (on the goal of a task) yields superior performance to focusing internally (on one's own mechanics). In my research, we are studying the physiological changes that underly these changes in performance using motion analysis and electromyography (EMG). Placebo effects in athletic tasks: Placebo effects have been studied for a long time; Placebo-control groups are common practice in medical research because the psycho-social context surrounding a treatment can have such significant effects on the treatment's efficacy. In athletics, placebo studies have mostly focused on pharmacological placebos. In my current work with Dr. Tor Wager, we are exploring how non-pharmacological placebos affect performance and how the placebo-performance relationship is mediated by expectations. Applied pedagogy – Motor skill acquisition in natural settings: This is a line of research I have been developing with one of my fellow doctoral students at the University of Colorado, Shaw Ketels. We are both interested in scaling up basic science research from the laboratory to real-world classrooms and learning environments. To that end, we have begun working with the American Association of Snowboard Instructors (AASI) to do naturalistic observation of snowboarding lessons at ski resorts in Colorado. We have collected a database of video and audio recordings of group snowboarding lessons that show students' improvement across the lesson and the verbal instructions given to students by instructors. From these video and audio data, we have extracted performance measures for students at different time points in the lesson, which allow us to track student improvement over time. Using hierarchical linear modeling techniques, we can see how changes in student performance over time are correlated with demographic variables for the lesson (e.g., group size, instructor's level of certification, weather conditions), characteristics of the student (e.g., age, previous experience), and the instructional style of the teacher (e.g., use of analogies, use of questions, use/type of attentional cues).
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