VISUAL INFORMATION AND OBJECT SIZE IN THE CONTROL OF REACHING

The role of vision in the control of reaching and grasping was investi gated by varying the available visual information. Adults (N = 7) reac hed in conditions that had full visual information, visual information about the target object but not the hand or surrounding environment, and no visual information. Four different object diameters were used. The results indicated that as visual information and object size decre ased, subjects used longer movement times, had slower speeds, and more asymmetrical hand-speed profiles. Subjects matched grasp aperture to object diameter, but overcompensated with larger grasp apertures when visual information was reduced. Subjects also qualitatively differed i n reach kinematics when challenged with reduced visual information or smaller object size. These results emphasize the importance of vision of the target in reaching and show that subjects do not simply scale a command template with task difficulty.