Adaptation of Joint Flexibility during a Reach-to-Grasp Movement

In the presence of motor redundancy, recent studies have shown that goal equivalent configurations of the body segments might be used by the central nervous system (CNS) instead of stereotypical movement patterns. In particular, some authors have shown that the CNS might choose a subset of joint configurations (termed the uncontrolled manifold or UCM) such that variability (goal equivalent variance or GEV) in this subset does not affect the value of a particular performance variable while variability in the orthogonal subset ORT (non-goal equivalent variance or NGEV) does. This hypothesis has been used successfully to test whether specific performance variables such as endpoint trajectory or segment global orientation are stabilized by the CNS or to study the influence of constraints on the organization of the movement. Few studies have examined the redundancy problem when considering obstacle avoidance during a grasping task. Indeed, the majority of the works on this topic considers non redundant arm mod...