title: The brain adjusts grip forces differently according to gravity and inertia: a parabolic flight experiment.
abstract: In everyday life, one of the most frequent activities involves accelerating and decelerating an object held in precision grip. In many contexts, humans scale and synchronize their grip force (GF), normal to the finger/object contact, in anticipation of the expected tangential load force (LF), resulting from the combination of the gravitational and the inertial forces. In many contexts, GF and LF are linearly coupled. A few studies have examined how we adjust the parameters-gain and offset-of this linear relationship. However, the question remains open as to how the brain adjusts GF regardless of whether LF is generated by different combinations of weight and inertia. Here, we designed conditions to generate equivalent magnitudes of LF by independently varying mass and movement frequency. In a control experiment, we directly manipulated gravity in parabolic flights, while other factors remained constant. We show with a simple computational approach that, to adjust GF, the brain is sensitive to how LFs are produced at the fingertips. This provides clear evidence that the analysis of the origin of LF is performed centrally, and not only at the periphery.
authors.affiliation: Unité de Formation et de Recherche en Sciences et Techniques des Activités Physiques et Sportives, Université de Bourgogne Dijon, France ; Unit 1093, Cognition, Action, and Sensorimotor Plasticity, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) Dijon, France.
authors.forename: Olivier
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: White
keywords: gravity; grip force; inertia; internal model; load force; rhythmic movement