Effects of response type on coordinated responses during arm movement

This paper reports some experimental results on the coordination of finger and vocal responses with passing through a target position in multijoint ar m movement. In Experiment 1, we found that the difference in the timing of finger and vocal responses cannot be attributed entirely to efferent or rep resentational effects. Instead, it appears to reflect the extent to which i nformation about the internal stimuli generated by the arm movement are ava ilable to the centers controlling these different responses. That is, it is a compatibility effect. In Experiment 2, the case in which a finger respon se is made on the same side of the body as the moving arm was compared with the case in which it is made with the contralateral hand, which remains st atic. The interaction effect observed suggests that the pathways subserving coordinated responses are informationally encapsulated, so that informatio n about arm movement is not shared between the neural centers controlling d ifferent coordinated responses.