How Variability and Effort Determine Coordination at Large Forces.

ABSTRACT: Motor control is a challenging task for the central nervous system, since it involves redundant degrees of freedom, nonlinear dynamics of actuators and limbs, as well as noise. When an action is carried out, which factors does your nervous system consider to determine the appropriate set of muscle forces between redundant degrees-of-freedom? Important factors determining motor output likely encompass effort and the resulting motor noise. However, the tasks used in many previous motor control studies could not identify these two factors uniquely, as signal-dependent noise monotonically increases as a function of the effort. To address this, a recent paper introduced a force control paradigm involving one finger in each hand that can disambiguate these two factors. It showed that the central

SUBMITTER: Kolossiatis M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4774921 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature