Full-body signatures in sensorimotor decision making

Everyday actions often appear simple, but they involve complex and constantly changing decisions and behavior. Imagine gathering ingredients from all over your kitchen to bake a cake which one do you reach for first, and how do you move about? Psychology and neuroscience have long studied how we plan and control movements, but most of this research happens under highly artificial laboratory conditionssitting still, moving only a hand, or reacting to images on a screen. Real life is messier. It`s fast-changing, often unpredictable, and involves the whole body. This project investigates how the **entire body expresses decision-making in motion**. When we move before we fully know our goal, such as walking toward the kitchen shelf to pick up several ingredients, we must plan, adjust, and coordinate many potential actions at once. Our research asks: Do our bodies show traces of this decision process in our posture and in the way we move our arms and legs? Can we see decisions develop over time as we approach and interact with real objects? Wireless motion-tracking and brain-recording technologies will allow research participants to move freely in space. We will design interactive, wirelessly controlled objects equipped with sensors and lights; these objects can prompt participants to interact with them, creating ambiguous contexts that can change from moment to moment. With this setup, we can record detailed full-body movements and brain activity while people perform natural actions such as walking, reaching, and grasping. To master the technical challenges and integrate scientific perspectives, the project brings together researchers from the University of Salzburg, the Mozarteum University Salzburg, and Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada). Understanding how the body expresses decisions helps reveal how we adapt so effortlessly to changing environments. We combine psychology, neuroscience, and technology to bridge the gap between controlled laboratory experiments and the rich complexity of everyday behavior. The results will help us understand how the brain integrates perception, decision, and movement in real-world situations. We hope these insights will inspire new approaches in rehabilitation, robotics, and brain-computer interfaces.