Bilateral associations of low-level unilateral performance: an unremarked aspect of limb control

The experimenters examine upper limb movement discrimination performance in an arm-raising task for bilateral associations of low-level unilateral performance. On a cue from the experimenter, young adults (n = 23) with no history of shoulder injury raised either their left arm, right arm, or both together in a forward flexion movement until their hand or hands contacted an unseen, adjustable, overhead stop. The participant then judged which of the 5 possible stop positions, in the 12-20 degrees range forward of true vertical, the participant had contacted on the particular trial. Results showed that for the 16 participants whose best performance was in 1 of the unimanual conditions discrimination scores in the bilateral condition were equivalent to those of their worse-performing limb. For the 7 participants whose best discrimination performance was obtained on bimanual arm-raising, scores for the 2 unimanual conditions were equivalently low. Therefore, when a single limb that can perform well operates in conjunction with a limb performing at a lower level, the consequence is lowering the bimanual movement discrimination performance.