THE ORGANIZATION OF MOTOR SYNERGIES IN ONE-PERSON AND TWO-PERSON MULTI-FINGER FORCE PRODUCTION TASKS

Abstract

Humans perform motor tasks every day, both individually and with others. Performing motor tasks involves the organization of motor synergies, task-specific groupings of individual motor effectors that are temporarily constrained to act as a single unit and whose total combined output ensures stability of the overall task performance. Both intra- and inter-personal motor synergies have been found to exist in one-person and two-person motor tasks, respectively. Not as clear, however, is whether separate synergies can exist simultaneously on multiple levels of control within a given task. The purpose of the current study is to investigate the organization of force-stabilizing motor synergies during one-person and two-person finger-force production tasks using the Uncontrolled Manifold Analysis. We expect to find both intra- and inter-personal motor synergies, an increase in synergy strength as tasks require more motor effectors, but the lack of simultaneously-occurring motor synergies on multiple levels of control within the given tasks.