Wrist redundancy management during pointing tasks remains stable over time and in presence of a visuomotor perturbation

Abstract

Pointing at a screen using wrist and forearm movements is a kinematically redundant task, and the Central Nervous System seems to manage this redundancy by using a simplifying strategy, named Donders’ Law for the wrist. In this work we investigated (1) whether this simplifying approach is stable over time and (2) whether a visuomotor perturbation provided in the task space influences the strategy used to solve the redundancy problem. We conducted two experiments asking participants to perform the same pointing task in four different days (first experiment), and providing a visual perturbation, i.e. a visuomotor rotation to the controlled cursor (second experiment), while recording their wrist and forearm rotations. Results showed that the participant-specific wrist redundancy management (described by the Donders’ surfaces) (1) neither changes over time (2) nor varies when a visuomotor perturbation is provided in the task space.