title: Embodied effects of conceptual knowledge continuously perturb the hand in flight.
abstract: Attending to a manipulable object evokes a mental representation of hand actions associated with the object's form and function. In one view, these representations are sufficiently abstract that their competing influence on an unrelated action is confined to the planning stages of movement and does not affect its on-line control. Alternatively, an object may evoke action representations that affect the entire trajectory of an unrelated grasping action. We developed a new methodology to statistically analyze the forward motion and rotation of the hand and fingers under different task conditions. Using this novel approach, we established that a grasping action executed after seeing a photograph of an object is systematically perturbed even into the late stages of its trajectory by the competing influence of the grasping posture associated with the object. Our results show that embodied effects of conceptual knowledge continuously modulate the hand in flight.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
authors.forename: Bernie C
authors.initials: BC
authors.lastname: Till
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Victoria mmasson@uvic.ca.
authors.forename: Michael E J
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Masson
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Victoria.
authors.forename: Daniel N
authors.initials: DN
authors.lastname: Bub
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
authors.forename: Peter F
authors.initials: PF
authors.lastname: Driessen
mesh_terms: D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D006225:Hand; D018737:Hand Strength / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D009038:Motion; D011187:Posture; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012399:Rotation; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: action representations; embodied knowledge; hand trajectory; kinematics