title: Listing's law for eye, head and arm movements and their synergistic control.
abstract: We have recorded eye, head, and upper arm rotations in five healthy human subjects using the three-dimensional search coil technique. Our measurements show that the coordination of eye and head movements during gaze shifts within +/- 25 deg relative to the forward direction is organized by restricting the rotatory trajectories of the two systems to almost parallel planes. These so-called "Listing planes" for eye-in-space and head-in-space rotations are workspace-oriented, not body-fixed. Eye and head trajectories in their respective planes are closely related in direction and amplitude. For pointing or grasping, the rotatory trajectories of the arm are also restricted to a workspace-oriented Listing plane. During visually guided movements, arm follows gaze, and the nine-dimensional rotatory configuration space for eye-head-arm-synergies (three degrees of freedom for each system) is reduced to a two-dimensional plane in the space of quaternion vectors.
authors.affiliation: Neurology Department, University Hospital, Zürich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Straumann
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Haslwanter
authors.forename: M C
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Hepp-Reymond
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hepp
mesh_terms: D001132:Arm / Q000502:physiology*; D004585:Electrooculography; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D006257:Head / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D011187:Posture; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012018:Reflex / Q000502:physiology; D012399:Rotation; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology; D014785:Vision, Ocular / Q000502:physiology