Abstract
The end-state comfort effect (Rosenbaum et al. 1990, 1992, 1993, 1996) predicts that people will grasp an object for transport in a way that allows joints to be in mid-range at the end of the transport. When participants in the present study took hold of a vertical cylinder to move it to a new position, grasp heights on the cylinder were inversely related to the height of the target position, as predicted by the end-state comfort effect. This demonstrates that where people grasp objects can give insight into the planning of movement. In the computational model of motor planning developed by Rosenbaum et al. (1995, 2001) it is assumed that goal postures are planned by a two-stage process of recall and generation. The distinction between recall and generation had not so far been tested. In the present study, the pattern of grasp heights in successive transports was consistent with the view that participants generated a plan the first time they moved the cylinder between two points, and that they subsequently recalled what they had done before, making small adjustments to that recalled plan. This outcome provides evidence for distinct effects of recall and generation on movement planning.
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Notes
We did not predict a main effect of repetition in any of our hypotheses. Since this effect did not recur in subsequent experiments, we consider it a statistical artifact.
Figure 2 does not show first-time and second-time transports separately even though the ANOVA yielded a significant repetition effect. The reason for not showing the two transports is that the repetition effect was small and not replicated in subsequent experiments. We averaged over first- and second-time grasp heights in each direction of movement here to make this figure comparable to the analogous figures for Experiments 2 and 3.
The ANOVA revealed two other interactions: (1) direction × repetition, F (1,36)=4.50, p<.05; and (2) repetition × condition, F (3,36)=3.3, p<.05. However, when we compared individual points with the best-fitting lines through the remaining four points for every subject, direction, and repetition, we found that 8 points out of 800 were more than 3.5 standard deviations away from the best-fitting, theoretical value on the line. When each of these outliers was removed and replaced with its corresponding theoretical point on the line, both of the foregoing interactions disappeared. Based on this outcome, we considered these two interactions to be statistical artifacts.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Sarah Benjamin, Robin Fleckenstein, Erin Halloran, and Kristin Sopronyi for help with experimental design, data collection, and data analysis. We also thank Kim Balent for help with digitizing and Mike Blaguszewski for help with figure preparation. Jason Augustyn and Steven Jax made helpful comments during the conduct of this research, and two anonymous reviewers helped us improve the quality of the article. The work was supported by grant SBR-94-96290 from the National Science Foundation, grants KO2-MH0097701A1 and R15 NS41887-01 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Research and Graduate Studies Office of The College of Liberal Arts, Pennsylvania State University.
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Cohen, R.G., Rosenbaum, D.A. Where grasps are made reveals how grasps are planned: generation and recall of motor plans. Exp Brain Res 157, 486–495 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-004-1862-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-004-1862-9