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    Learning to coordinate a redundant motor system : the role of postural comfort

    Author
    Barton, Sean L.
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    174625_Barton_rpi_0185N_10519.pdf (6.339Mb)
    Other Contributors
    Fajen, Brett R.; Gray, Wayne D., 1950-; Kalsher, Michael J.;
    Date Issued
    2014-12
    Subject
    Cognitive science
    Degree
    MS;
    Terms of Use
    This electronic version is a licensed copy owned by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. Copyright of original work retained by author.;
    Metadata
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    URI
    https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13015/1251
    Abstract
    When realizing a motor goal, actors have access to a large number of redundant action possibilities from which a particular movement must be selected. Comfort has been shown to play an important role in the selection of particular actions and may be important for resolving the redundancy problem. To understand the relationship between comfort and motor redundancy, I asked subjects to perform a novel motor control task involving coordinated arm movements. Using a full-body motion capture system, the angles of six arm joints were mapped onto the position of a cursor in a 2D virtual environment. Subjects moved the cursor between four targets by adopting different arm postures. The mapping between arm posture and cursor position was redundant and unintuitive, presenting a novel redundancy problem to be resolved. Over practice, subjects constrained movements to a subset of motor solutions consistent with more comfortable body postures. A reduction in the overall complexity of movements, and an increase in the similarity between postures adopted was also observed. Taken together, these findings suggest that the comfort of particular motor solutions is important for constraining the set of redundant actions, as well as improving motor performance in a novel motor task.;
    Description
    December 2014; School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
    Department
    Dept. of Cognitive Science;
    Publisher
    Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
    Relationships
    Rensselaer Theses and Dissertations Online Collection;
    Access
    Users may download and share copies with attribution in accordance with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. No commercial use or derivatives are permitted without the explicit approval of the author.;
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