Effectivities for Reach-to-Grasp Actions

I just reviewed the affordance properties that produce the spatial structure in reach-to-grasp actions, and there's an unquestioned assumption lurking in that analysis. Luckily, Mon-Williams & Bingham (2011) actually did question it, so I wanted to cover that part of the paper here.

The assumption in the analyses I described last time is that the unit of action is the aperture between the finger and thumb, and not the fingers themselves. Bingham refers to this as an opposition vector (Iberall, Bingham, & Arbib, 1986; van Bergen et al, 2007). In some ways, this is a weird idea; the action system working to control a space between limbs, and not the limbs! Smeets & Brenner (1999) proposed that grasping is actually about the two limbs. Mon-Williams & Bingham tested these hypotheses and found evidence in favour of the opposition vector.

I want to walk through this in a little detail, though, as of course identifying the relevant elemental variables is part of an UCM analysis, and affordance research helps here too. The task analysis that reveals affordance property options also points to effectivity property options (at least it should - these are complementary after all!). But another part of the UCM approach is that it can, in principle, test hypotheses about elemental and performance variables, so I want to lay this out as well.

Affordances for the Spatial Structure of Reach-To-Grasp (Mon-Williams & Bingham, 2011)

I have reviewed the spatial and temporal structure of reach-to-grasp movements, and the task dynamical analysis that has connected affordance properties and reach-to-grasp effectivities. Now it's time to work through some papers exploring this task using this analysis.

The first paper is Mon-Williams & Bingham (2011). The goal of this paper was to investigate what target properties shape the spatial structure of the reach-to-grasp movement. This means the behaviour of the hand as it forms a grip aperture and then encloses and contacts the object. Specifically, we want to examine the maximum grip aperture (MGA), which occurs partway through the reach and is larger than the object, and the terminal grip aperture (TGA), which occurs when the hand has stopped moving and the hand encloses the object, but before the fingers are in contact with the object. The question is, what object properties determine how these apertures are scaled? 

The Task Dynamics of Reaching-to-Grasp

In the last post, I reviewed the basic form of the reach-to-grasp task and the basic spatial and temporal structure of the resulting reach-to-grasp action. I'm shortly going to review three papers by Bingham about where all this structure comes from, but first I wanted to sketch out the task analysis those papers will rely on. 

The question at hand is, in the context of reaching-to-grasp an object, what are the relevant object affordances? What follows is derived from Mon-Williams & Bingham (2011), which I will review fully in the next post. I've tried to fully flesh it out, though, to be as complete as possible. The goal is to lay out the likely relevant task dynamics; this leads to specific predictions about which manipulations should affect which parts of the reach-to-grasp action.

The Spatial and Temporal Structure of Reach-to-Grasp Movements

This post is part of my current series where I am developing a research programme to formally connect affordances and motor abundance analyses (see the intro post here). The first thing I need is a task that has a formal affordance analysis; my chosen task is reaching-to-grasp (sometimes called prehension). I'm pivoting to this task from throwing for a few reasons. First, I need a simpler task. The logistics of data collection and analysis for throwing tasks are large and I just don't have the resources right now; I do have the kit for these studies. Second, I want to expand my own skill set to a new domain, and reach-to-grasp is another venerable topic. Finally, it means I get to spend time really grappling with other work by Geoff Bingham, who was my PhD supervisor and who remains the person who's work I admire the most. 

This post is about the basic form of the reach-to-grasp movements studied in the lab, what some of the key measures are, and the fact these are sensitive to task demands (suggesting they are emerging from an active perception-action loop). In the next post I will work through the initial task analysis that leads us to candidate affordance properties. 

Motor Abundance & the Affordances for Reaching-to-Grasp

Movements are never the same twice, even when you are trying to do that same thing over and over. Variability is an inescapable fact of trying to organise and run a complex system such as a human body. But there is more than one source of variability in movement; there's noise, and then there's redundancy, and these are not the same thing. 

Our movement systems are redundant; specifically, they always have more degrees of freedom available than are ever required to perform a given task. This means that there is always more than one way to perform any given task, and this can range from slight variations to complete reorganisations. 

Redundancy is a feature, not a bug. It means that we can reliably achieve a task goal in the face of perturbations that range from trial-to-trial fluctuations in execution up to surprises like tripping or the sudden appearance of an obstacle. However, it poses two related control problems. First, a problem of action selection: given that there are many functional organisations of degrees of freedom that could solve that task, which do we choose, and why? Second, a problem of action control: once we have our degrees of freedom organised, we still have some left over that need to be actively controlled; how do we do this, and why do we control them the way we do?

Patient DF uses haptics, not intact visual perception-for-action to reach for objects

Before functional neuroimaging techniques like PET and fMRI became common, what we knew about which parts of the brain did what came from neuropsychology. This is the study of patients with specific injuries to the brain, and the basic logic of the field is that if you have a patient with a lesion in area A who can't do task 1, then area A is involved in performing task 1. It gets a little more complicated than this, as you search for double dissociations, etc, but this is essentially it.

A surprising amount of what we think we know about the brain comes from neuropsychology; famous case studies such as HM have informed theories of memory so that they include short and long term storage, which are separable, and so on. These case studies can have a profound effect on research; my favourite story, though, was about a memory researcher who had a skiing accident and temporarily developed retrograde amnesia - he couldn't remember anything except that there was this guy in Connecticut (HM) who couldn't remember things either!

I always enjoyed classes in neuropsychology; the case studies are always fascinating. But they are deeply limited in what they can actually tell us about the brain. First, they are typically single patient case studies, which restricts how general the conclusions are. Second, they are data from damaged brains; the fairly linear assumption that some localised function has been subtracted out is simply not true, and the damage will have had complex effects on distributed functional networks.Third, the damage is never straight-forward, because these almost all come from accidents or strokes (HM's surgery being a rare example of more detail being known). This has not stopped the field being very excited by these cases, though, and from basing a lot of theory on these patterns of deficits.

In movement research, the most famous neuropsychology case study is Patient DF She suffered bilateral damage along the ventral stream of visual processing (James et al, 2003). The effect was visual form agnosia: she is able to control her actions with respect to objects, but cannot describe or recognise these objects verbally. Crucially, her accident did not damage her parietal lobe; specifically, the dorsal stream of visual processing was left intact. These two streams are well defined anatomical pathways leading out of primary visual cortex, and were first described by Ungerleider & Mishkin, 1982). DF's pattern of deficits led Mel Goodale and David Milner (Goodale & Milner, 1992) to suggest functional roles for these streams. The ventral stream, they suggested, was for perception - things like object and scene recognition. The dorsal stream, in contrast, was for perception-for-action, and used visual information for the online control of action. This perception-action hypothesis has been hugely dominant in the field, and the theory rests heavily on DF's shoulders.

Recently, Thomas Schenk (2012a) published some data which claims to show that DF's visually guided reaching is not normal if she doesn't have access to haptic feedback about the object. His data suggests that the only reason she succeeds at reaching while failing judgment tasks is that haptic information is only normally available in the former case. If correct, this is actually quite a shot across the bow of the perception vs perception-for-action work; naturally Goodale and Milner don't buy it, and have published a reply to which Schenk has then replied.

An invitation
I like seeing these arguments happen in the literature; but to be honest, the time scale is too slow. Schenk publishes, then Milner et al get to reply and Schenk gets right of reply to that. They may or may not iterate again and it's always left as 'we agree to disagree'. But these critiques have answers, and I think a blog comment feed might be the right place to work through the various cycles of suggestions and rebuttals until the obviously wrong things have been weeded out. It would also provide a place for other interested parties to weigh in. So if Schenk, Milner and Goodale (and anyone else!) feel like using the comments for this post or another made to purpose to bang around ideas until an obvious experiment or analysis pops out, please feel free!