Page 372 - Sensing, Intelligence, Motion : How Robots and Humans Move in an Unstructured World

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS 347

T

S

A

Figure 7.9 In this simplistic maze, the subjects seem less inclined to explore the dead-
end corridor A when walking from S to T than when walking from T to S.

6. Based on standard practice for cognitive tests, along with some subjects’
comments, it is worthwhile to explore human motion planning skills along
some demographic lines. For example,
• Performance as a function of gender (consider the proverbial proficiency
of meninhandlingmaps).
• Performance as a function of age: For example, are children better than
adults in spatial reasoning tasks (as they seem to be in some computer
games or with the Rubik’s Cube)?
• Performance as a function of educational level and professional orienta-
tion: For example, wouldn’t we expect students majoring in mechanical
engineering to do better in our tests than students majoring in comparative
literature?
7. Finally, there is an important question of training and practice. We all know
that with proper training, people achieve miracles in motion planning; just
think of an acrobat on a high trapeze. In the examples above, subjects
were given a chance to get used to the task before a formal test was
carried out, but no attempt was made to consistently study the effect of
practice on human performance. The effect of training is especially serious
in the case of arm operation, in view of the growing area of teleoperation
tasks (consider the arm operator on the Space Shuttle, or a partially disabled
person commanding an arm manipulator to take food from the refrigerator).
This suggests that the training factor must be a part of the larger study.

This list covers a good number of issues and consequently calls for a rather
ambitious study. In the specific study described below, not all questions on the
list have been addressed thoroughly enough, due to the difficulty of arranging a
statistically representative group of subjects. Some questions were addressed only
cursorily. For example, attempts to enlist in the experiment a local kindergarten
or a primary school had a limited success, and so was an attempt to round up
enough subjects over the age of 60.
The very limited number of tests carried out for these insufficiently studied
issues provide these observations: (a) Children do not seem to do better than
adults in our tests. (b) Subjects aged 60 and over seem to have significantly more
difficulty carrying out the tests: in the arm test, in particular, they would give