Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

We are regularly required to choose a safe travel path through cluttered environments in our daily lives (i.e. travelling between two different stores at the mall without colliding with an obstacle). Vision is very important to this process as it is the only sensory system that gives us information at a distance. Additionally, it is also essential to also know your body dimensions. Without this knowledge, navigation strategies would be inaccurate, and people would likely collide with obstacles. To date, it is well understood that young adults are able to consistently navigate around obstacles through the use of vision and their body dimensions (Hackney & Cinelli, 2013). However, young adults do not avoid obstacles with exact accuracy of their body size. Instead, young adults use a buffer which is larger than their shoulder width to guide their actions. In contrast, athletes may avoid obstacles using a more exact understanding of their body size. Participation in sport requires athletes to fit through small gaps and to do so accurately. Therefore athletes may have more accurate obstacle avoidance strategies than young adults. The purpose of the current study is to determine the effects of sport-specific training on guiding obstacle avoidance strategies. In order to achieve this, perceptual judgements will be recorded (whether they believe they fit through a gap) as well as obstacle avoidance strategies of athletes and young adults via measurements of body movements and gaze tracking. Preliminary findings suggest that athletes choose to walk through smaller gaps than young adults. These gaps are closer to their actual body dimensions than those identified by young adults as being able to safely pass through. Moving forward, a larger data sample and more detailed analysis will provide an in depth understanding of sport-specific training on navigation strategies within cluttered environments.