Helping the waiter to hold his tray: Rigid haptic linkage promotes inter-personal motor coordination.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Ferreiro DN
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8392761 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Whether knowledge-based intra-molecular inter-residue potentials are valid to represent inter-molecular interactions taking place at protein-protein interfaces has been questioned in several studies. Differences in the chain connectivity effect and in residue packing geometry between interfaces and single chain monomers have been pointed out as possible sources of distinct energetics for the two cases. In the present study, the interfacial regions of protein-protein complexes are examined to extract inter-molecular inter-residue potentials, using the same statistical methods as those previously adopted for intra-molecular residue pairs. Two sets of energy parameters are derived, corresponding to solvent-mediation and "average residue" mediation. The former set is shown to be highly correlated (correlation coefficient 0.89) with that previously obtained for inter-residue interactions within single chain monomers, while the latter exhibits a weaker correlation (0.69) with its intra-molecular counterpart. In addition to the close similarity of intra- and inter-molecular solvent-mediated potentials, they are shown to be significantly more residue-specific and thereby discriminative compared to the residue-mediated ones, indicating that solvent-mediation plays a major role in controlling the effective inter-residue interactions, either at interfaces, or within single monomers. Based on this observation, a reduced set of energy parameters comprising 20 one-body and 3 two-body terms is proposed (as opposed to the 20 x 20 tables of inter-residue potentials), which reproduces the conventional 20 x 20 tables with a correlation coefficient of 0.99.
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Project description:One important motivation for people behaving prosocially is that they want to avoid negative and obtain positive emotions. In the prosocial behavior literature however, the motivations to avoid negative emotions (e.g., guilt) and to approach positive emotions (e.g., warm glow) are rarely separated, and sometimes even aggregated into a single mood-management construct. The aim of this study was to investigate whether anticipated guilt if not helping and anticipated warm glow if helping are influenced similarly or differently when varying situational factors related to personal responsibility to help. Helping scenarios were created and pilot tests established that each helping scenario could be formulated both in a high-responsibility version and in a low-responsibility version. In Study 1 participants read high-responsibility and low-responsibility helping scenarios, and rated either their anticipated guilt if not helping or their anticipated warm glow if helping (i.e., separate evaluation). Study 2 was similar but here participants rated both their anticipated guilt if not helping and their anticipated warm glow if helping (i.e., joint evaluation). Anticipated guilt was clearly higher in the high-responsibility versions, but anticipated warm glow was unaffected (in Studies 1a and 1b), or even higher in the low-responsibility versions (Study 2). In Studies 3 (where anticipated guilt and warm glow were evaluated separately) and 4 (where they were evaluated jointly), personal responsibility to help was manipulated within-subjects. Anticipated guilt was again constantly higher in the high-responsibility versions but for many types of responsibility-manipulations, anticipated warm glow was higher in the low-responsibility versions. The results suggest that we anticipate guilt if not fulfilling our responsibility but that we anticipate warm glow primarily when doing over and beyond our responsibility. We argue that future studies investigating motivations for helping should measure both anticipated negative consequences for oneself if not helping, and anticipated positive consequences for oneself if helping.
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Project description:BACKGROUND:Virtual reality (VR) offers unprecedented opportunity as a scientific tool to study visuomotor interactions, training, and rehabilitation applications. However, it remains unclear if haptic-free hand-object interactions in a virtual environment (VE) may differ from those performed in the physical environment (PE). We therefore sought to establish if the coordination structure between the transport and grasp components remain similar whether a reach-to-grasp movement is performed in PE and VE. METHOD:Reach-to-grasp kinematics were examined in 13 healthy right-handed young adults. Subjects were instructed to reach-to-grasp-to-lift three differently sized rectangular objects located at three different distances from the starting position. Object size and location were matched between the two environments. Contact with the virtual objects was based on a custom collision detection algorithm. Differences between the environments were evaluated by comparing movement kinematics of the transport and grasp components. RESULTS:Correlation coefficients, and the slope of the regression lines, between the reach and grasp components were similar for the two environments. Likewise, the kinematic profiles of the transport velocity and grasp aperture were strongly correlated across the two environments. A rmANOVA further identified some similarities and differences in the movement kinematics between the two environments - most prominently that the closure phase of reach-to-grasp movement was prolonged when movements were performed in VE. CONCLUSIONS:Reach-to-grasp movement patterns performed in a VE showed both similarities and specific differences compared to those performed in PE. Additionally, we demonstrate a novel approach for parsing the reach-to-grasp movement into three phases- initiation, shaping, closure- based on established kinematic variables, and demonstrate that the differences in performance between the environments are attributed to the closure phase. We discuss this in the context of how collision detection parameters may modify hand-object interactions in VE. Our study shows that haptic-free VE may be a useful platform to study reach-to-grasp movements, with potential implications for haptic-free VR in neurorehabilitation.
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Project description:Our brain is known to automatically optimize effort expenditure during motor coordination, such that for example, during bimanual braking of a bicycle, a well-oiled brake will automatically be used more than a corroded, heavy brake. But how does our brain infer the effort expenditure? All previous motor coordination models have believed that the effort in a task is known precisely to our brain, solely from the motor commands it generates. Here we show that this belief is incorrect. Through experiments and simulation we exhibit that in addition to the motor commands, the returning haptic signals play a crucial role in the inference of the effort during a force sharing task. Our results thus elucidate a previously unknown sensory-motor association that has major ramifications for our understanding of motor coordination and provides new insights into how sensory modifications due to ergonomics, stroke and disease can affect motor coordination in humans.
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2023-07-06 | GSE214593 | GEO
Project description:The extent to which hand dominance may influence how each agent contributes to inter-personal coordination remains unknown. In the present study, right-handed human participants performed object balancing tasks either in dyadic conditions with each agent using one hand (left or right), or in bimanual conditions where each agent performed the task individually with both hands. We found that object load was shared between two hands more asymmetrically in dyadic than single-agent conditions. However, hand dominance did not influence how two hands shared the object load. In contrast, hand dominance was a major factor in modulating hand vertical movement speed. Furthermore, the magnitude of internal force produced by two hands against each other correlated with the synchrony between the two hands' movement in dyads. This finding supports the important role of internal force in haptic communication. Importantly, both internal force and movement synchrony were affected by hand dominance of the paired participants. Overall, these results demonstrate, for the first time, that pairing of one dominant and one non-dominant hand may promote asymmetrical roles within a dyad during joint physical interactions. This appears to enable the agent using the dominant hand to actively maintain effective haptic communication and task performance.
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