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The Journal of Neuroscience, December 1, 1998, 18(23):10105-10115
Postural Hand Synergies for Tool Use
Marco
Santello,
Martha
Flanders, and
John F.
Soechting
Neuroscience Department, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
Minnesota 55455
Subjects were asked to shape the right hand as if to grasp and use
a large number of familiar objects. The chosen objects typically are
held with a variety of grips, including "precision" and "power"
grips. Static hand posture was measured by recording the angular
position of 15 joint angles of the fingers and of the thumb. Although
subjects adopted distinct hand shapes for the various objects, the
joint angles of the digits did not vary independently. Principal
components analysis showed that the first two components could account
for >80% of the variance, implying a substantial reduction from the
15 degrees of freedom that were recorded. However, even though they
were small, higher-order (more than three) principal components did not
represent random variability but instead provided additional
information about the object. These results suggest that the control of
hand posture involves a few postural synergies, regulating the general
shape of the hand, coupled with a finer control mechanism providing for
small, subtle adjustments. Because the postural synergies did not
coincide with grip taxonomies, the results suggest that hand posture
may be regulated independently from the control of the contact forces that are used to grasp an object.
Key words:
hand shape; grasping; kinematics; fingers; grip; human
Copyright © 1998 Society for Neuroscience 0270-6474/98/182310105-11$05.00/0
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