Help me write a good lay summary of my coordination research

I'm writing a grant proposal, and part of the process involves a 4000 character lay summary of the project; what I'm up to, what the objectives are and who the likely beneficiaries are. The goal is for this to be in language a non-expert can understand (Research Councils use these summaries when they promote funded grants to the wider public). I am, frankly, cursed with too much knowledge, and pitching these lay summaries is always a challenge. What I would like is for people, especially non-experts, to have a look at the text below and give me feedback - are there sections that aren't popping? Sentences that aren't clear? Entire sections that seem a bit mysterious?

Please feel free to leave comments pointing out things that aren't working (and things that are, too, actually: it's good for me to get a feeling for what I'm doing right here). If you felt like spreading this around via Twitter, G+, whatever your fancy, I'd appreciate all and any feedback on this!

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The purpose of this project is to study how we acquire and perform skilled motor activities. Even those of us who aren’t elite athletes perform surprisingly complex actions such as locomotion (walking, driving a car) all the time, and typically with great skill. All these motor activities depend on perception (e.g. vision) for their success – we look where we’re going, and we coordinate our behaviour with others by monitoring what they are doing. Understanding how we perform such skilled motor activities therefore means we must understand the role of perceptual information in supporting these perception-action activities – what kind of information do we use, and how do we use it? A second important fact about our ability to perform skilled movements is that they are learned: it takes time and practice to coordinate the movement of our own limbs to achieve a goal, let alone coordinate our behaviour with that of others. Again, perception plays a vital role, and to study learning we must again ask questions about the information we perceive and how it is used.

The research in the current proposal sets out a method to go about carefully answering these types of questions. The experiments rely on a perception-action task called rhythmic movement coordination, a simple yet surprisingly rich task that has been studied extensively for over 25 years and continues to serve as an ideal test bed for understanding skilled movement. A simple version of the task is as follows: take your index fingers, and move them up and down at the same time; now move them so they alternate. Both of these rhythms are easy to produce, but interestingly, previous research has established that these are actually the only two rhythms people can produce reliably. Try to produce the intermediate, syncopated rhythm; this might be easy if you go slowly, but as soon as you speed up you will likely lose the rhythm (unless you’ve had training, perhaps with a musical instrument). This simple task involves all the key elements we’re interested in understanding (voluntary movement, which is coordinated across limbs via perception) and we can therefore use it to uncover the general principles underlying the performance of skilled actions. In addition, we can also investigate the process of learning novel rhythms and uncover how we learn to use visual information to generate and control new skilled actions.

The outcomes for this project will be an extensive set of data exploring how people use visual information to control coordinated rhythmic movements, and how they learn to produce new rhythms. These data will let us identify the visual information and how, exactly, it is being used. We will then use these data to create a mathematical model of performance in this task. Models provide us with a way to summarise the results of experiments, and to generate hypotheses to guide future research; we will demonstrate this by using the model we develop to predict how people will control their eyes as they visually control their actions.

Answers to these questions about performance and learning have many applications. One example is improving training for elite athletes; another is developing interventions to improve the recovery of motor function after an injury or a stroke (rehabilitation is a form of learning, after all). While coordinated rhythmic movement isn’t a task you’d use in training or rehabilitation, the lessons learned from studying it can directly inform these activities and help improve them in the future. Our research team is already using this task as a tool to investigate how perception-action skills change across the life-span, and the current proposal will support this effort. Older adults often have problems with perception-action skills and consequences (e.g. falls) pose real dangers. Lessons from how older adults perform coordinated rhythmic movements are helping us understand these changes in greater detail, and will help improve interventions.

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