Trajectory formation of step-tracking wrist movements predicted by an optimal control model

In this study, we apply an optimal motor control model to the step-tracking wrist movement task. The motor control model was originally proposed for arm reaching movement and succeeded in predicting experimentally observed features in movement kinematics. As is the case with arm reaching movement, step-tracking wrist movement includes redundancy in trajectory formation. Therefore, step-tracking wrist movement can be a good test bed for computational models of neural motor control. We show that our model can predict spatiotemporal patterns in movement kinematics of the wrist movements. In addition, we discuss the mechanism that determines the characteristic of the movement kinematics from motor control and biomechanical viewpoints.