The effect of endpoint congruency on bimanual transport and rotation tasks

Abstract

The completion of many goal oriented skills requires the tight coordination of the right and left hands to achieve the task objective. Although the coordination of wrist transport and orientation of the hand before object contact has been studied in detail for discrete bimanual tasks, as yet, very few studies have examined bimanual coordination when the target is already in hand. It has been shown that congruency of the goal facilitates the production of discrete bimanual responses. The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of goal congruency on precision bimanual transport and rotate tasks. In the current investigation, participants transported two cubic objects while rotating them laterally to place them into tight-fitting targets. The magnitude of the rotation could be the same for both hands (i.e., both 45 or 90°) or different (i.e., one 45 and 90°) and the endpoint orientations (i.e., goal) could either be congruent or incongruent. Results indicated that when the endpoint orientation was congruent for the two hands, movement times were similar regardless of hand (left or right), rotation magnitude (45, 90°) and whether the rotation magnitude for the two hands was the same or different. These results suggest that congruency of the endpoint goal facilitates the temporal synchronization of the transport component for two limbs. In contrast, a different pattern of results was obtained when considering the rotation component. Specifically, regardless of whether the hands were rotating the same magnitude or ending in congruent endpoint positions, the coordination of the rotation component between the hands was asynchronous. We hypothesize that the greater requirement to shift visual fixation from one hand/target to the other to ascertain the separate goal orientations may explain these differences. These results provide further evidence that multiple constraints act to influence the performance of skilled bimanual tasks.