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Multi-Gain Control: Balancing Demands For Speed And Precision, Lucas Warner Lemasters

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Woodworth's Two-Component Theory (1899) partitioned speeded limb movements into two distinct phases: (1) a central ballistic open-loop mechanism and (2) a closed-loop feedback component. The present study investigated the implementation of multi-gain control configurations that utilized separate gain values for each movement phase. A target acquisition task using Fitts' Law (1954) was performed within a virtual environment using three control devices with three gain settings: mono-gain, dual-gain and continuous gain. The gain settings differed by the amount of gain values available to the participant. It was found that dual-gain and continuous gain configurations yielded lower movement times and higher information-processing …