When associate professor Tim Welsh was a PHE undergrad and a Blues hockey player, he had his sights set on teaching high school phys ed or becoming a personal trainer. Despite logging some volunteer time in the lab, he didn’t have serious thoughts about a career in research until he lent a hand at the Special Olympics, where his brother was a competitive bowler. “My brother, who has some developmental delays, is a tremendous bowler – but he has difficulty with some simple tasks like tying his shoes.”
Wanting to know more about how the brain is behind these contradictions, Welsh learned to love the lab. And that epiphany on the bowling lanes led to a promising career in behavioural research, which recently received recognition on two fronts: a $100,000 Early Researcher Award from the province and a five-year $135,000 grant from the Natural Sciences Research Council of Canada.
Welsh’s research currently involves a series of two-person tests that evaluate how people react to stimuli based on their observations of the reactions of others. The ultimate aim of this work is to understand how we are able coordinate our actions with other people to achieve a common goal.
One test involves two people sitting opposite each other at a table, responding as quickly as they can when lights flash randomly. One-person tests like this have historically shown that reaction times are generally longer when the person returns to a particular light that he or she recently responded to, a phenomenon called the “inhibition of return effect.” Welsh likens it to someone searching for something that has been lost. “If you’re searching through a room, you never search one location, then a new location and then back to the first location. You would keep going to new locations, making your search pattern really efficient. So once you search a location you inhibit that location temporarily.”
Welsh’s two-person light test shows that the inhibition of return effect is just as strong when a subject is responding to a light that his partner recently responded to as it is when he responds to a light he himself has recently responded to. “This tells us that, when performing a task with someone else, our partner’s actions affect us the same way our own actions affect us.”
The work has a number of potential applications in clinical health and workplace settings. But Welsh’s early experiences have kept him interested in applying his research to special populations. Some of his work has focused on people with autism, including a study published in Brain Research in 2008. “People with autism have difficulty with communication and social engagement more generally. One of the recent thoughts on the cause of these difficulties is that they have a dysfunction in representing other people’s actions. And if you can’t understand other people’s actions, you can’t understand that they have different intentions than you have,” says Welsh. “There’s potentially this cascade of problems which can initially originate in understanding action. Consistent with this idea, we recently found that people with autism don’t demonstrate that same inhibition of return effect [when performing a task with a partner].”
Welsh says his work, which involves collaborations with several psychology and neuroscience colleagues across the University, creates a foundation for designing therapeutic approaches to facilitating human performance on any number of levels. “Whether it’s designing workspaces for the average populations or allowing someone with a cognitive disorder to better perform acts of daily living, that’s the ultimate goal. In the meantime I’ve just having fun doing the research.”
