Abstract
Surprisingly little is known about how people plan and control everyday physical actions, such as walking along and picking up objects. In order to explore this topic, we conducted an experiment in which university students were asked to pick up a common object (a child’s beach bucket) that stood on a table several meters from the participant’s start position. The bucket stood either on the left side, in the middle, or on the right side of the table and, depending on instructions, was to be carried to a farther target whose horizontal position was also varied. The questions were which side of the table the participant would walk along when picking up the bucket and which hand the participant would use to pick up and carry the bucket. Participants, most of whom were righthanded, preferred to walk along the left side of the table and to pick up the bucket with the right hand, although they departed from that preference when the reaching distance across the table was uncomfortable or if the target was too far to the right. The data were well fit with a mathematical model that included a right-hand bias and an estimate of functional distance that expressed the cost of reaching over some distance as approximately twice the cost of walking over the same distance.
References
Bryden, P. J., & Roy, E. A. (2006). Preferential reaching across regions of hemispace in adults and children. Developmental Psychobiology, 48, 121–136.
Carnahan, H., McFadyen, B. J., Cockell, D. L., & Halverson, A. H. (1996). The combined control of locomotion and prehension. Neuroscience Research Communications, 19, 91–100.
Claxton, L. J., Keen, R., & McCarty, M. E. (2003). Evidence of motor planning in infant reaching behavior. Psychological Science, 14, 354–356.
Cockell, D. L., Carnahan, H., & McFadyen, B. J. (1995). A preliminary analysis of the coordination of reaching, grasping, and walking. Perceptual & Motor Skills, 81, 515–519.
Cohen, R. G., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (2004). Where objects are grasped reveals how grasps are planned: Generation and recall of motor plans. Experimental Brain Research, 157, 486–495.
Doyen, A.-L., & Carlier, M. (2002). Measuring handedness: A validation study of Bishop’s reaching card test. Laterality, 7, 115–130.
Georgopoulos, A. P., & Grillner, S. (1989). Visuomotor coordination in reaching and locomotion. Science, 245, 1209–1210.
Goodnow, J. J., & Levine, R. A. (1973). “The grammar of action”: Sequence and syntax in children’s copying. Cognitive Psychology, 4, 82–98.
Haggard, P. (1998). Planning of action sequences. Acta Psychologica, 99, 201–215.
Marteniuk, R. G., & Bertram, C. P. (2001). Contributions of gait and trunk movement to prehension: Perspectives from world- and bodycentered coordinates. Motor Control, 5, 151–164.
Marteniuk, R. G., Leavitt, J. L., MacKenzie, C. L., & Athenes, S. (1990). Functional relationships between grasp and transport components in a prehension task. Human Movement Science, 9, 149–176.
Oldfield, R. C. (1971). The assessment and analysis of handedness: The Edinburgh inventory. Neuropsychologia, 9, 97–113.
Rosenbaum, D. A., Cohen, R. G., Meulenbroek, R. G., & Vaughan, J. (2006). Plans for grasping objects. In M. Latash & F. Lestienne (Eds.), Motor control and learning over the lifespan (pp. 9–25). New York: Springer.
Rosenbaum, D. A., Halloran, E. S., & Cohen, R. G. (2006). Grasping movement plans. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 918–922.
Todorov, E. (2004). Optimality principles in sensorimotor control. Nature Neuroscience, 7, 907–915.
van der Wel, R. P., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (2007). Coordination of locomotion and prehension. Experimental Brain Research, 176, 281–287.
Weigelt, M., Cohen, R. G., & Rosenbaum, D. A. (2007). Returning home: Locations rather than movements are recalled in human object manipulation. Experimental Brain Research, 149, 191–198.
Weir, P. L., MacDonald, J. R., Mallat, B. J., Leavitt, J. L., & Roy, E. A. (1998). Age-related differences in prehension: The influence of task goals. Journal of Motor Behavior, 30, 79–89.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Rosenbaum, D.A. Reaching while walking: Reaching distance costs more than walking distance. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 15, 1100–1104 (2008). https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.6.1100
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.6.1100