Posted on Oct. 8: Go speed racer!

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/biker.jpg” caption=”A biker in the Sun lab”]When elite cyclists are racing down Hamilton's mountain this week, you might think they know how fast they're going from information they get from their eyes.

Not so.

McMaster behavioural neuroscientist Hong-Jin Sun and a team of researchers have found that feedback from cyclists' legs to their brains is more important than vision in determining speed.

Sun, a psychology professor, and his team use virtual reality technology combined with a modified stationary mountain bike to evaluate how the brain integrates different sources of information.

The study, the first of its kind, will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal CyberPsychology & Behaviour.

Sun said virtual reality technology allows researchers to create realistic and natural testing scenarios while maintaining the ability to systematically manipulate visual and kinesthetic stimuli while monitoring the corresponding behaviour.

“This allows us to study the moment-to-moment coordination of visual information with body movements,” said Sun. “The real-time manipulation of the relation between different sources of information can't be achieved in a real world experimental task; however, this can now be accomplished using virtual reality. Further, the sense of presence'  the subjective experience of being within an environment, is also much greater in a multisensory, immersive, human-computer interface than in a simple computer desktop display.”

In their study, the researchers found that when visual cues and body movement cues were provided separately or in combination, either cue can provide sufficient information to the brain to determine speed. When researchers made the two cues inconsistent, they found that the body cues played a more dominant role.

Sun said this research could help elite cyclists fine tune their body performance as they understand the integrated relationship between the visual and body cues at work when they race.

A similar study recently published in the journal of Experimental Brain Research by the same group, examines how humans estimate distance travelled, another important source of information for cyclists.

The research is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

Photo caption: A virtual reality bike setup in the Sun lab