Hand-Foot Coordination 2: Grasp Difficulty Modulates Association Between Preparation for Subsequent Action and Lower Limb Stability
The image above depicts the experimental setup. This time, our team of 6 researchers ran 32 participants through 2 conditions. Results suggest that people increase the stability of their lower limbs when grasping targets that are difficult to aim at. However, when the prehension task is easy, participants will forgo optimum stability in order to prepare for the subsequent movement that the lower limbs will need to make.
Design Implications
During tasks requiring the combined control of grasping and walking, our hands and feet “talk to each other”. The hands will tell the feet “Hey, I need you to slow down because this object is hard to grasp”, and the feet will slow and increase stability. If the object is easy to grasp, the hands will tell the feet “It’s ok, go ahead and do your thing, I don’t need any help”, and in this case, the feet are able to prepare for whatever action they need to do post-grasp. Smart technology interested in assisting movements could make more accurate predictions of their user’s future actions by understanding what their user’s current actions reflect cognitively.
