Citation

Potts CA, Brown AA, Solnik S, Rosenbaum DA. Acta Psychol. 2017; 180: 117-121.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, United States; Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, United States.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.actpsy.2017.08.012

PMID

28938167

Abstract

There is no generally accepted method for measuring manual position control. We developed a method for doing so. We asked university students to hold a handle that had one rotational degree of freedom. The angular position of the handle depended on the degree of pronation-supination of the forearm. The subjects' task was to hold the handle as steadily as possible to keep a needle positioned in a pie-shaped target zone on a computer screen. If the needle remained in the zone for 0.5s, the gain of the feedback loop increased; otherwise the gain decreased or remained at the starting value of 1. Through this adaptive procedure, we estimated the maximum gain that could be achieved at each of the four pronation-supination angles we tested (thumb up, thumb down, thumb in, and thumb out) for each hand. Consistent with previous research on manual control, and so validating our measure, we found that our participants, all of whom were right-handed, were better able to maintain the needle in the target zone when they used the right hand than when they used the left hand and when they used midrange wrist postures (thumb up or in) rather than extreme wrist postures (thumb down or out). The method provides a valid test of manual position control and holds promise for addressing basic-research and practical questions.

Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Manual positioning; Motor control; Visual feedback