Abstract
The current study examined whether the amount and location of available movement information influenced the stability of visuomotor coordination. Participants coordinated a handheld pendulum with an oscillating visual stimulus in an inphase and antiphase manner. The effects of occluding different amounts of phase at different phase locations were examined. Occluding the 0°/180° phase locations (end-points) significantly increased the variability of the visuomotor coordination. The amount of occlusion had little or no affect on the stability of the coordination. We concluded that the end-points of a visual rhythm are privileged and provide access to movement information that ensures stable coordination. The results are discussed with respect to the proposal of Bingham (Ecol Psychol 16:45–43, 2004) and Wilson et al. (Exp Brain Res 165:351–361, 2005) that the relevant information for rhythmic visual coordination is relative direction information.
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Notes
Compared to the small magnitude difference in amplitude measured in the present study, in a related experiment by de Rugy et al. (2008) even a threefold increase in stimulus amplitude had no influence on the stability of visuo-motor coordination.
The results of a pilot experiment that included manipulation of the location of occlusion at a fixed occlusion amount of 80° revealed that the variability of relative phase was equal to control (no occlusion) in all but the end-point occlusion location condition.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Justin Goodman for his help with data collection and Bruce Kay, Kerry Marsh, and Michael Turvey for their helpful comments. This work was funded by National Science Foundation Grants BSC-0240277, BCS-0240266, and BCS-0750190.
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Hajnal, A., Richardson, M.J., Harrison, S.J. et al. Location but not amount of stimulus occlusion influences the stability of visuomotor coordination. Exp Brain Res 221, 351–355 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-1982-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-1982-3