Haptic Identification of Virtual Surfaces

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Everyday tasks, such as handling and manipulating objects, may pose difficult challenges for survivors of stroke. The way in which our brain controls arm movements is likely to be shaped by our experience of interactions with objects and their mechanical and dynamic properties. During reaching movements information about surfaces and obstacles is implicitly incorporated into our actions. Much research has been performed to understand how humans acquire haptic information through touch. There has also been a great deal of work performed to understand how we generate reaching movements. While each of these topics in and of itself is important to understand how we interact with our environment, it is evident that true understanding of environmental interaction involves the simultaneous incorporation of the neural processes involved in haptic interaction as well as reaching movement. However, very little work has been performed to understand how movement is effected by haptic sense. This proposal will examine the neural processes involved during reaching movements in contact with fixtures. My goal is to bring haptic research and motor control research into a unified conceptual framework. I hypothesize that haptic interactions with surfaces can be described by the nervous system's combination of two distinct motor primitives: a position control primitive and a force control primitive. This proposal will present experiments and computational modeling to establish if these primitives do in fact exist in the nervous system, and if these primitives may be trained to enhance haptic perception.