John Stins

Ever since my PhD, which I obtained in 1998, I am fascinated by how environmental stimuli are processed and coupled to motor control. My earlier scientific work focused on manual actions such as reaching and grasping, and how they are coordinated in space and time. In my current work I focus on balance control, and I ask how psychological states such as emotion, arousal, and cognition, perturb or support the regulation of balance. In addition, I ask how these processes are affected by various psychopathologies, such as autism and anxiety.Influences of emotion on balance

Charles Darwin recognized that emotions have clear communicative and behavioral characteristics, such as preparing the body for fight or flight. These innate tendencies manifest themselves in postural changes, such as ‘freeze’ and ‘avoidance’. Using recordings of the body center of pressure, PhD-student Daniëlle Bouman and I study how static balance and the initiation of gait are influenced by affective states, induced by pictorial stimuli.

Embodiment

One of the tenets of the embodied cognition theory is that mental states are grounded in the physical body, which can manifest itself as reciprocity between mental states and bodily states. Motivated by this approach, I performed various experiments on how mental activity (e.g., language processing) is reflected in changes in motor activity. I also study how bodily states affect perceptual judgments of geometric properties of the environment.