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9th Tübinger Wahrnehmungskonferenz
Friday 3rd - Sunday 5th March 2006
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Preparing Two Actions: The Influence of Actions Goals on the Production of Bimanual Responses
Matthias Weigelt (MPI für Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften, Munich)
The dexterity of our two hands is strongly affected by a coalition of constraints – whether perceptual, cognitive, neural, and/or neuromuscular – enslaving the coordinative system. Much research has been devoted to investigate these constraints at the neural and neuromuscular level. Recently, however, constraints at the perceptual and cognitive level have gained considerable attraction, where the influence of perceptual effects and action goals on movement coordination has been the focus of research. We investigated the control of goal-directed actions in a series of experiments involving bimanual reaching, bimanual object manipulation, and bimanual end-state comfort. The results show that bimanual coordination is constraint by the similarity action goals rather than by properties inherent in the neuromuscular system that carries out these goal-directed actions. Thereby, action goals can relate to body-intrinsic states or body-extrinsic states according to the actor’s current intentions. We conclude that movement planning is constrained by action goals, but largely unaffected by the type of motor actions necessary to achieve these goals. |
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