Workshop: Matthew Howard

In the context of reaching, it is generally held that increasing impedance improves accuracy, but at the cost of increased energetic effort. In order to mitigate this cost, one possible strategy for the CNS is to selectively reduce the impedance in task-irrelevant dimensions - the so-called minimum intervention principle, that is predicted by optimal (feedback) control theories of human movement. In this talk, I will briefly describe a study conducted to test this theory, in which subjects are asked to reach under different accuracy demands.
I will then present several computational models of this experiment, and describe how the predictions appear to contradict the results
obtained from the human subjects.