Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

The proposed research evaluates how much persons with an amputation plan their movements with their prosthesis, vs. how much they rely on visual feedback from the resulting movement of the prosthesis. Depending on the ways in which they plan these movements, various types of feedback mechanisms would be more or less useful. Therefore, determining these models may provide insight into the most useful feedback mechanisms. In order to evaluate how people plan these movements, we need to have them learn a variety of unique environmental constructs, and then unexpectedly provide a different environmental construct that looks identical, to see how they respond. For example, providing a milk sac that looks full but is actually empty. The standardized way to do this in the field of computational motor control is to use a manipulandum, which is a robot that can simulate a variety of environmental constructs. Since you don't know which construct it will simulate, it is easy to suddenly change the construct without cuing the subject, thus resulting in accurate models of how the person plans their movement and incorporates visual feedback. This tool proposal requests a manipulandum, along with the accompanying visual equipment necessary to render these environmental constructs.