Abstract
When producing a drawing and when copying a geometrical pattern, the subject organizes the sequence of his or her graphic movements (strokes) in a way which is by no means ad hoc or arbitrary. Specifically, the manual execution of a geometrical pattern appears to be governed by a set of biases determining the starting points, stroke directions and stroke order of the graphic-production sequence. These constraining principles are often called ‘rules’, although they have a probabilistic rather than a deterministic status. The ‘rules’ also appear to have different strength. The present study attempts to assess the strength values of each of eight such ‘rules’ given a specific set of patterns. The experiment collects stroke-sequence data of fifteen adult subjects copying a well-defined set of 149 geometrical patterns twice. Subsequently, their behavior is simulated by a computer algorithm in which the weights of eight ’rules’ are optimized, minimizing the deviation between the frequency distributions of the simulated and the original stroke sequences. The model operates in a probabilistic fashion according to several stages dealing with each subsequent stroke successively. The weights obtained allow the model to produce 88 percent of the patterns in the same way as the human subjects did. It is shown that further refinements should improve on this performance. A brief discussion of behavioral data such as reaction times and kinematic features illuminates the facilitatory function of several of the graphic production rules.
1) The reported research was in part performed by the second author as one of his MA assignments at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Nijmegen. It was conducted in the framework of NWO Project 560-259-035 ‘Graphic production’. Further support was received from ESPRIT Project 419 ‘Image and movement understanding’. The present article was written while the first author was a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). Technical assistance by Dr. Frans Maarse and mathematical advice by Professor Eddy Roskam are gratefully acknowledged.
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Thomassen, A.J.W.M., Tibosch, H.J.C.M. (1991). A Quantitative Model of Graphic Production. In: Requin, J., Stelmach, G.E. (eds) Tutorials in Motor Neuroscience. NATO ASI Series, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3626-6_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3626-6_22
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