Abstract
A habitual and a goal-directed system contribute to action selection in the human CNS. We examined to which extent both systems interact when selecting grasps for handling everyday objects. In Experiment 1, an upright or inverted cup had to be rotated or moved. To-be-rotated upright cups were more frequently grasped with a thumb-up grasp, which is habitually used to hold an upright cup, than inverted cups, which are not associated with a specific grasp. Additionally, grasp selection depended on the overarching goal of the movement sequence (rotation vs. transport) according to the end-state comfort principle. This shows that the habitual system and the goal-directed system both contribute to grasp selection. Experiment 2 revealed that this object-orientation-dependent grasp selection was present for movements of the dominant- and non-dominant hand. In Experiment 3, different everyday objects had to be moved or rotated. Only if different orientations of an object were associated with different habitual grasps, the grasp selection depended on the object orientation. Additionally, grasp selection was affected by the horizontal direction of the forthcoming movement. In sum, the experiments provide evidence that the interaction between the habitual and the goal-directed system determines grasp selection for the interaction with every-day objects.
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Notes
Please note that the selection of a grasp posture itself can be considered as setting the (sub-) goal to assume a specific posture at the moment of grasping. Thus, also habitually selected grasping postures may result in necessarily goal-directed grasping movements. This apparent contradiction arises because the selection of the grasp posture may be considered as the result of an action selection process when observed from the task perspective (e.g. rotating an object) but as a goal itself when observed from the movement perspective (e.g. grasping an object with prone forearm orientation).
The excluded participants used the following grasps: upright–upright: 2× handle, 3×thumb-up; upright-inverted: 1× thumb-up, 2× thumb-down, 2× handle; inverted-upright: 1× thumb-down, 4× handle; inverted–inverted: 3× thumb-up, 1× handle, 1× error (participant did not rotate cup).
As no videos were recorded in Experiment 1, we analyzed handle grasps in Experiment 2. In Experiment 2, 6 out of 16 handle grasps were non-functional with respect to drinking.
In one trial, the participant rotated the cup using a thumb-down grasp but placed it on the far circle. After additional instruction, he moved the cup to the near circle without rotating it, using a thumb-up grasp. This trial was included in the analysis as thumb-down trial.
We report Greenhouse-Geisser corrected P-values but uncorrected F-values.
Please note that left-to-right movement and right-to-left movements differed not only in the direction of the movement but also with respect to the location of the start- and end-point. As start point and end-point were only 12 cm apart, we believe that the direction of the movement is the main source of the observed effects.
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Herbort, O., Butz, M.V. Habitual and goal-directed factors in (everyday) object handling. Exp Brain Res 213, 371–382 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2787-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2787-8