The effects of a change in gravity on the dynamics of prehension

Abstract

Investigating cyclic vertical arm movements with an instrumented hand-held load in an airplane undergoing parabolic flight profiles allowed us to determine how humans modulate their grip force when the gravitational and the inertial components of the load force are varied independently. Eight subjects participated in this study; four had already experienced parabolic flights and four had not. The subjects were asked to move the load up and down continuously at three different gravitational conditions (1 g, 1.8 g, and 0 g). At 1 g, the grip force precisely anticipated the fluctuations in the load force, which was maximum at the bottom of the object trajectory and minimum at the top. When gravity changed, the temporal coupling between grip force and load force persisted for all subjects from the first parabola. At 0 g, the grip force was accurately adjusted to the two load force peaks occurring at the two opposite extremes of the trajectory due to the absence of weight. While the experienced subjects exerted a grip force appropriate to a new combination of weight and inertia since their first trial, the inexperienced subjects dramatically increased their grip when faced with either high or low force levels for the first time. Then they progressively released their grip until a continuous grip-load force relationship with regard to 1 g was established after the fifth parabola. We suggest that a central representation of the new gravitational field was rapidly acquired through the incoming vestibular and somatic sensory information.