Planning Movements in a Simple Redundant Task

There are infinitely many different combinations of arm postures which will place the hand at the same point in space [1]. Given this abundance, how is one configuration chosen over another? Two main hypotheses have been proposed to solve this problem [2]. Postural models suggest that the posture adopted is purely determined by the desired hand position (known as Donders' law) [3, 4]. Transport models suggest that the adopted posture depends on where the hand has moved from. A specific transport model, the minimum work model, has been proposed in which the adopted posture is the one that minimizes the amount of work required to move the hand to the new location [5]. The postural model predicts that the posture will be independent of where the hand has moved from, whereas the transport models predict that the posture will depend on the previous posture. We have devised a simple redundant task—touching a target bar using a hand-held virtual stick—to examine these models. The results show that neither model alone can account for the data. We propose a control planning strategy in which there is a combined cost function that has both a postural term as well as a transport term