Adaptations to Postural and Manual Control During Tool Use

Abstract

Tool use is an important area of research in psychology, neurophysiology, and motor behavior because it provides insights into the organization of perception, cognition, and action. Tool use research has traditionally focused on the neural structures or cognitive processes that contribute to body-tool integration, while there has been comparatively little interest in motor control. When tool use actions are studied, adaptations have mainly been examined at the level of manual control, while postural control and multi-segment coordination have received less attention. Examining these components of behavior in the context of tool use is vital for developing a better understanding of how humans integrate tools into goal-directed actions. The goals of this dissertation were to 1) characterize adaptations to postural control over time when performing a manual task with a tool under different levels of postural constraint and determine their relation to manual task performance, 2) examine postural-manual coupling under different levels of postural constraint during tool use, and 3) determine how multi-segment coordination supports postural stability and suprapostural task performance under different levels of postural constraint during tool use. To address these questions, we adopted a sensorimotor adaptation paradigm to examine postural-manual control and multi-segment coordination before, during, and after an extended bout of tool use. Tool-use adaptations were found to extend beyond the end-effector. Postural control played a crucial role in facilitating improvements in the manual control of tools. Placing constraints on posture interfered with these adaptations, disrupting the coordination of posturalmanual behaviors during tool use. However, multi-segment coordination was modified to overcome this challenge and facilitate postural stability and manual performance. These results demonstrate that healthy young adults are capable of flexibly recruiting and exploiting available degrees of freedom in a task-dependent manner the potential challenges associated with integrating tools into movements. This dissertation provides preliminary support for the importance of considering postural control in tool use actions and highlights the utility of examining interactions across multiple levels of motor behavior—postural control, manual control, postural-manual coupling, and multi-segment coordination—to elucidate how tools are integrated into complex, goal-directed behaviors