Human Arm Trajectory Formation

In order to investigate the strategies used to plan and control multijoint arm trajectories, two-degrees-of-freedom arm movements performed by normal adult humans were recorded. Only the shoulder and elbow joints were active. When a subject was told simply to move his hand from one visual target to another, the path of the hand was roughly straight, and the hand speed profile of their straight trajectories was bell-shaped. When the subject was required to produce curved hand trajectories, the path usually had a segmented appearance, as if the subject was trying to approximate a curve with low curvature elements. Hand speed profiles associated with curved trajectories contained speed valleys or inflections which were temporally associated with the local maxima in the trajectory curvature. The mean duration of curved movements was longer than the mean for straight movements. These results are discussed in terms of trajectory control theories which have originated in the fields of mechanical manipulator control and biological motor control. Three explanations for the results are offered.