The characteristics of arm movements executed in unusual force environments

Human subjects pointed at stationary visual targets without sight of their arm while the force environment was varied by applying weight or spring loads to the hand. The path travelled by the finger, pointing accuracy, and the shape of the finger velocity profile remained invariant across all force environments after a single practice trial. However, the magnitude and duration of the velocity profile depended consistently on the presence and size of a weight load. In contrast, velocity was not affected by spring loads. An analysis of movement dynamics in our study indicated that inertial and gravitational load components were compensated by separate mechanisms, the former employing time- and the latter magnitude scaling of muscle force profiles. The presence of such separate mechanisms led us to predict little problems for movement dynamics in weightlessness, which was indeed confirmed in a study on pointing movements aboard the KC-135 aircraft.