Christie Pelzer , College of Liberal Arts 08'
The Effects of Target Size on Postural Activity in Social Coordination
Major
Kinesiology
Mentor
Thomas Stoffregen
Brief Bio
I am attending my last year as an undergraduate at the U of M and hope to attend physical therapy school next year. While not in school, I like to play tennis, hockey and eat Japanese cuisine!
Future Plans
Hopefully be accepted to physical therapy graduate school.
Why Research?
The Kinesiology honors program focuses on research, specifically an undergraduate research project. Thus, when I enrolled in the program, I was given the opportunity to become involved in the research that is being conducted within the U of M Kinesiology department.
What Did I Get from Research?
My research experience has far exceeded my initial expectations. Initially, I thought this research would satisfy my honors requirement, and give me a little insight to working in a lab. However, during my research experience, I obtained so much more. I was able to learn about the process of doing research, develop a sense of awareness about current research that is being conducted and have the opportunity to work with well accomplished individuals in the lab.
How Did I Start?
Being that I was a part of the Kinesiology Honors Program, I was introduced to the UROP by my Lab director, Dr. Stoffregen who was also head of the honors program. He was my faculty mentor and encouraged me to apply for the UROP to assist in my undergraduate research project.
My Advice for Another Student:
I would encourage students to become involved with research as soon as possible. There are so many topics being investigated within the University, so the first step would be to find what interests you and contact faculty within that specific area.
Research Summary
When we are awake we are rarely in a state of complete motionlessness, even when one is asked to stand still. This is due to a slight movement that is constantly occurring about each individual. This movement is referred to as postural sway. Postural sway can range from of very subtle movements to large movements of our body. A more specific topic under investigation within postural sway is called supra-postural activity, which is when an individual engages in an activity while controlling their posture (i.e. standing about a fixed location when looking at an object).
In everyday activity, individuals frequently work together to achieve goals. The experiment that we performed aims to give us a better understanding of how interpersonal activity can influence body sway. This also allows us to better understand if social coordination can increase the efficiency of a task performed cooperatively by two individuals. Thus, for our experiment within the Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory, we had multiple pairs of people converse to identify differences between pictures while varying the sizes for each trial. During our experiments, we used a tracking system to measure their postural sway. Through these experiments, we are trying to determine how the effects of the varying picture sizes effect the postural coordination of each pair of individuals.