I'm writing a grant proposal, and part of the process involves a 4000 character lay summary of the project; what I'm up to, what the objectives are and who the likely beneficiaries are. The goal is for this to be in language a non-expert can understand (Research Councils use these summaries when they promote funded grants to the wider public). I am, frankly, cursed with too much knowledge, and pitching these lay summaries is always a challenge. What I would like is for people, especially non-experts, to have a look at the text below and give me feedback - are there sections that aren't popping? Sentences that aren't clear? Entire sections that seem a bit mysterious?
Please feel free to leave comments pointing out things that aren't working (and things that are, too, actually: it's good for me to get a feeling for what I'm doing right here). If you felt like spreading this around via Twitter, G+, whatever your fancy, I'd appreciate all and any feedback on this!
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The purpose of this project is to study how we acquire and perform skilled motor activities. Even those of us who aren’t elite athletes perform surprisingly complex actions such as locomotion (walking, driving a car) all the time, and typically with great skill. All these motor activities depend on perception (e.g. vision) for their success – we look where we’re going, and we coordinate our behaviour with others by monitoring what they are doing. Understanding how we perform such skilled motor activities therefore means we must understand the role of perceptual information in supporting these perception-action activities – what kind of information do we use, and how do we use it? A second important fact about our ability to perform skilled movements is that they are learned: it takes time and practice to coordinate the movement of our own limbs to achieve a goal, let alone coordinate our behaviour with that of others. Again, perception plays a vital role, and to study learning we must again ask questions about the information we perceive and how it is used.
The research in the current proposal sets out a method to go about carefully answering these types of questions. The experiments rely on a perception-action task called rhythmic movement coordination, a simple yet surprisingly rich task that has been studied extensively for over 25 years and continues to serve as an ideal test bed for understanding skilled movement. A simple version of the task is as follows: take your index fingers, and move them up and down at the same time; now move them so they alternate. Both of these rhythms are easy to produce, but interestingly, previous research has established that these are actually the only two rhythms people can produce reliably. Try to produce the intermediate, syncopated rhythm; this might be easy if you go slowly, but as soon as you speed up you will likely lose the rhythm (unless you’ve had training, perhaps with a musical instrument). This simple task involves all the key elements we’re interested in understanding (voluntary movement, which is coordinated across limbs via perception) and we can therefore use it to uncover the general principles underlying the performance of skilled actions. In addition, we can also investigate the process of learning novel rhythms and uncover how we learn to use visual information to generate and control new skilled actions.
The outcomes for this project will be an extensive set of data exploring how people use visual information to control coordinated rhythmic movements, and how they learn to produce new rhythms. These data will let us identify the visual information and how, exactly, it is being used. We will then use these data to create a mathematical model of performance in this task. Models provide us with a way to summarise the results of experiments, and to generate hypotheses to guide future research; we will demonstrate this by using the model we develop to predict how people will control their eyes as they visually control their actions.
Answers to these questions about performance and learning have many applications. One example is improving training for elite athletes; another is developing interventions to improve the recovery of motor function after an injury or a stroke (rehabilitation is a form of learning, after all). While coordinated rhythmic movement isn’t a task you’d use in training or rehabilitation, the lessons learned from studying it can directly inform these activities and help improve them in the future. Our research team is already using this task as a tool to investigate how perception-action skills change across the life-span, and the current proposal will support this effort. Older adults often have problems with perception-action skills and consequences (e.g. falls) pose real dangers. Lessons from how older adults perform coordinated rhythmic movements are helping us understand these changes in greater detail, and will help improve interventions.
The research in the current proposal sets out a method to go about carefully answering these types of questions. The experiments rely on a perception-action task called rhythmic movement coordination, a simple yet surprisingly rich task that has been studied extensively for over 25 years and continues to serve as an ideal test bed for understanding skilled movement. A simple version of the task is as follows: take your index fingers, and move them up and down at the same time; now move them so they alternate. Both of these rhythms are easy to produce, but interestingly, previous research has established that these are actually the only two rhythms people can produce reliably. Try to produce the intermediate, syncopated rhythm; this might be easy if you go slowly, but as soon as you speed up you will likely lose the rhythm (unless you’ve had training, perhaps with a musical instrument). This simple task involves all the key elements we’re interested in understanding (voluntary movement, which is coordinated across limbs via perception) and we can therefore use it to uncover the general principles underlying the performance of skilled actions. In addition, we can also investigate the process of learning novel rhythms and uncover how we learn to use visual information to generate and control new skilled actions.
The outcomes for this project will be an extensive set of data exploring how people use visual information to control coordinated rhythmic movements, and how they learn to produce new rhythms. These data will let us identify the visual information and how, exactly, it is being used. We will then use these data to create a mathematical model of performance in this task. Models provide us with a way to summarise the results of experiments, and to generate hypotheses to guide future research; we will demonstrate this by using the model we develop to predict how people will control their eyes as they visually control their actions.
Answers to these questions about performance and learning have many applications. One example is improving training for elite athletes; another is developing interventions to improve the recovery of motor function after an injury or a stroke (rehabilitation is a form of learning, after all). While coordinated rhythmic movement isn’t a task you’d use in training or rehabilitation, the lessons learned from studying it can directly inform these activities and help improve them in the future. Our research team is already using this task as a tool to investigate how perception-action skills change across the life-span, and the current proposal will support this effort. Older adults often have problems with perception-action skills and consequences (e.g. falls) pose real dangers. Lessons from how older adults perform coordinated rhythmic movements are helping us understand these changes in greater detail, and will help improve interventions.
Andrew, have I mentioned before that I actually LIKE grant writing? There are lots of opportunities to say things more succinctly, but those edits are only a concern once the message is in the right order. The biggest problem, I think, is that you are missing an opportunity to 'get to the point' faster. I recommend something more like this:
ReplyDeleteThe purpose of this project is to study how we acquire and perform skilled motor activities. We all perform surprisingly complex learned behaviours everyday (walking, driving a car, writing, dressing). We typically perform them with ease, the perceptual and behavioral aspects of the tasks blend together seamlessly. All the core of many of these perceptual-motor activities is rhythmic motion. This is obvious in the case of walking or typing, but even driving or putting on a jacket requires coordination of the two hands in relation to each other. Watch a child still learning to walk, or to put on a jacket, and it is clear that they have not mastered the rhythmic nature of the tasks, and the same problems can be seen when you watch a stroke patient who has lost the rhythmic control they once had. Thus basic research into the physical dynamics of coordinated motion has applications ranging from the training of elite athletes to the developing interventions to improve the recovery of motor function.
The experiments proposed rely on a simple yet surprisingly rich task that has been studied extensively for over 25 years, and continues to serve as an ideal test bed for understanding skilled movement. The basic version of the task is as follows: take your index fingers, and move them up and down at the same time; now move them so they alternate. Both of these rhythms are easy to produce, but interestingly, other rhythms are quite hard to produce without training. Intermediate, syncopated rhythm can seem easy to produce if you go slowly, but as soon as you speed up you will eventually lose the rhythm (unless you’ve had training, perhaps with a musical instrument). This simple task involves voluntary rhythmic movement, coordinated via perception-action coupling, and a learning element: all the key elements we’re interested in understanding. We can therefore use it to uncover general principles underlying the development and performance of skilled actions.
ReplyDeleteThe outcomes for this project will be an extensive set of data exploring how people use visual information to control coordinated rhythmic movements, and how they learn to produce new rhythms. These data will let us identify the how, exactly, visual information is being used to guide development and execution of initially difficult tasks. We will then use these data to create a mathematical model of performance in this task. Such models provide us with a way of summarizing the results of experiments, but more importantly they generate conceptual insights that apply to the broader category of rhythmic behavior, and they generate hypotheses that are general to all to guide future research. Our first extension of the model will be predict of how people control their eyes as they visually control their actions. One example application of such an extension would be inform rehabilitation therapists. While current therapy focuses on motor control itself, it is quite likely that an essential factor in leaning to correctly coordinate rhythmic tasks is learning to perceive correctly, i.e. learning to pay attention to specific aspects of what is happening by looking in the right place. Such perception-action coupling comes naturally during normal development, but may need to be relearned as a result of impairment.
Our research team is already using the rhythmic-motion task as a tool to investigate how perception-action skills change across the life-span, and the current proposal will support this effort. Older adults often have problems with perception-action skills and the consequences (e.g. falls) pose real dangers. Lessons from how older adults perform coordinated rhythmic movements are helping us understand these changes in greater detail, and will help improve interventions.
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