Interpersonal strategies for disturbance attenuation during a rhythmic joint motor action

PHYSIOLOGY & BEHAVIOR

卷:147

Article

Melendez-Calderon, A.^1,3  Komisar, V.^2,3  Burdet, E.³ 

[1] Northwestern Univ, Dept Phys Med & Rehabil, Evanston, IL 60208 USA

[2] Univ Toronto, Inst Biomat & Biomed Engn, Toronto, ON M5S 1A1, Canada

[3] Univ London Imperial Coll Sci Technol & Med, Dept Bioengn, London SW7 2AZ, England

关键词: Interpersonal coordination;    Human-human interaction;    Joint motor action;   

DOI  :  10.1016/j.physbeh.2015.04.046

来源: Elsevier

【 摘 要 】

Helping someone carry a table is fairly easy; however, our understanding of such joint motor actions is still poorly understood. We studied how pairs of human subjects (referred to as dyads) collaborate physically to attenuate external mechanical perturbations during a target tracking task. Subjects tracked a target moving in a slow and predictable way using wrist flexion/extension movements, with and without destabilizing torque perturbations. Dyad strategies were classified using interaction torques and muscular activity. During unperturbed interactions (baseline), the dyads tended to stabilize on a particular strategy. The baseline strategy was not the same in all dyads, suggesting that the solution to the task was not global but specific to each particular dyad. After several trials of unperturbed interactions, we introduced mechanical vibrations and analyzed the adaptation process. Dyads showed a tendency to counteract the external disturbances by first increasing co-contraction within each subject (independent co-contraction), and then raising the amount of opposing interaction torques (dyadic co-contraction) with increased perturbation amplitude. The introduction of perturbations impelled dyads to abandon their unperturbed baseline strategy and adopt a more common strategy across dyads, suggesting attractor solutions. Our results establish a framework for future human-human interaction studies, and have implications in human motor control as well as human-robot and robot-robot interactions. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Inc.

【 授权许可】

Free