Kinesthetic compensation for sensorimotor rearrangements.
The authors report a new sensorimotor phenomenon in which participants use hand-sensed kinesthetic information to compensate for rotational sensorimotor rearrangements. This compensation benefits from conscious awareness and is related to hand posture. The technique can reduce control inefficiency with some misalignments by as much as 64%. The results support Y. Guiard's (1987) suggestion that in bimanual tasks one hand provides an operational frame of reference for the other hand as in a closed kinematic chain. Results with right-handed participants show that the right and left hands are equally effective at providing such a cue. A constant-angular-targeting-error model, similar to that used for hand movements by H. Cunningham and I. Vardi (1990) and for walking by S. K. Rushton, J. M. Harris, M. R. Lloyd, and J. P. Wann (1998), is used to model the trajectories of targeting hand movements demonstrating the phenomenon. The model provides a natural parameter of the error.
Ellis
Stephen R
SR
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California 94619, USA. stephen.r.ellis@nasa.gov
Adelstein
Bernard D
BD
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006225:Hand / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007699:Kinesthesis / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D009068:Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D009949:Orientation / Q000502:physiology*; D011187:Posture / Q000502:physiology; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012399:Rotation; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology