Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Visual, Motor And Attentional Influences On Proprioceptive Contributions To Perception Of Hand Path Rectilinearity During Reaching, Robert A. Scheidt, Kyle P. Lillis, Scott J. Emerson

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

We examined how proprioceptive contributions to perception of hand path straightness are influenced by visual, motor and attentional sources of performance variability during horizontal planar reaching. Subjects held the handle of a robot that constrained goal-directed movements of the hand to the paths of controlled curvature. Subjects attempted to detect the presence of hand path curvature during both active (subject driven) and passive (robot driven) movements that either required active muscle force production or not. Subjects were less able to discriminate curved from straight paths when actively reaching for a target versus when the robot moved their hand through the …