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Tapping on a target: dealing with uncertainty about its position and motion.
Eli Brenner1, Cristina de la Malla2,3, Jeroen B J Smeets2
1Department of Human Movement Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Van der Boechorststraat 7, 1081BT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. eli.brenner@vu.nl.
Experimental Brain Research
|November 13, 2022
Summary
Human reaching movements adapt to moving targets by continuously updating visual information and extrapolating velocity. This strategy corrects for bias, enabling precise goal-directed movements even with changing target dynamics.
Area of Science:
- Motor control
- Human movement science
- Perception-action coupling
Background:
- Reaching movements rely on accurate target location estimates.
- Accumulating visual information improves precision but can bias estimates for moving targets.
- Understanding the trade-off between precision and bias in dynamic environments is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate how humans balance visual information precision and bias during reaching movements.
- Determine the strategy used to guide movements towards stationary and moving targets.
- Examine if and how movement strategies adapt to changing target velocities.
Main Methods:
- Participants performed visually-guided reaching (tapping) tasks.
- Targets were stationary or moved with added positional jitter.
- Analysis focused on responses to jitter and performance with accelerating targets.
Main Results:
- Humans continuously update target position information during reaching.
- For moving targets, instantaneous position is combined with velocity extrapolation.
- Movement bias due to velocity changes is reduced by compensating for consistent endpoint errors.
Conclusions:
- Human reaching movements integrate continuous visual updates with velocity extrapolation.
- Muscle low-pass filter characteristics contribute to movement smoothness.
- Adaptive error compensation refines movements for accuracy and precision in dynamic scenarios.
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