Auditory Coding of Reaching Space

Abstract

Reaching movements are usually initiated by visual events and controlled visually and kinesthetically. Lately, studies have focused on the possible benefit of auditory information for localization tasks, and also for movement control. This explorative study aimed to investigate if it is possible to code reaching space purely by auditory information. Therefore, the precision of reaching movements to merely acoustically coded target positions was analyzed. We studied the efficacy of acoustically effect-based and of additional acoustically performance-based instruction and feedback and the role of visual movement control. Twenty-four participants executed reaching movements to merely acoustically presented, invisible target positions in three mutually perpendicular planes in front of them. Effector-endpoint trajectories were tracked using inertial sensors. Kinematic data regarding the three spatial dimensions and the movement velocity were sonified. Thus, acoustic instruction and real-time feedback of the movement trajectories and the target position of the hand were provided. The subjects were able to align their reaching movements to the merely acoustically instructed targets. Reaching space can be coded merely acoustically, additional visual movement control does not enhance reaching performance. On the basis of these results, a remarkable benefit of kinematic movement acoustics for the neuromotor rehabilitation of everyday motor skills can be assumed.

Ultra-responsive, low-dimensional unfamiliar movement sonification guides unconstrained reaches to invisible targets in 3D space

“…To the best of our knowledge, these studies are representative of three research trends. First, results suggesting sonified spatial information is used in motor control are limited to low DoF movements (Boyer et al 2017;Fehse et al 2020). Studies sonifying high DoF movements typically sonify and explore the effects on kinematic variables like velocity (Danna et al 2015;Danna and Velay 2017;Liu et al 2022;, or examine the effectiveness of sonification as rehabilitation using coarse-grained spatial sonifications (Nikmaram et al 2019;Raglio et al 2021).…”

“…Second, there is often a preference against unfamiliar sonifications and for natural sonifications that exploit ecological spatial encodings (e.g., stereophonic information) or ecological action-sound associations (Danna et al 2015;Sigrist et al 2016;Schaffert et al 2017;Fehse et al 2020;Vidal et al 2020;Liu et al 2022). This preference derives from ecological approaches to auditory perception (Gaver 1993) and in the sonification literature is motivated by the idea that it's easier to interpret feedback that exploits known associations.…”

“…Third, movement sonification systems are built with responsiveness well below the temporal processing potential of audition. Typical sonification systems sample sensors and update auditory feedback at 100Hz (Boyer et al 2013(Boyer et al , 2017Effenberg et al 2016;Schaffert et al 2017;Ahmetovic et al 2019;Fehse et al 2020;Linnhoff et al 2022;Liu et al 2022), or 200Hz or 300Hz (Danna and Velay 2017;Dyer et al 2017;), but we are not aware of any sampling faster than that. As for latency, typical systems run either in the 5-29ms range (Boyer et al 2013;Brückner et al 2014;Schaffert et al 2020) or 30-50ms range (Boyer et al 2017;Linnhoff et al 2022), with some running with 100ms or more (Reh et al 2019;Vidal et al 2020).…”

“…Because the sonification is unfamiliar, we expected that motor learning would be necessary. Hence, unlike Fehse et al (2020), we decided not to change the target between trials, but instead gave each participant a single target to learn. However, we expected relatively fast learning, given the responsiveness and lowdimensionality of the system.…”

Special Issue: Movement Biomechanics and Motor Control

“…This special issue provides a demonstration of this. The papers collected deal with anticipatory postural adjustments [2] and anticipatory locomotor adjustments [3], strategies to tackle obstacles [2][3][4], the effects of weight unloading on gait [5], posture control in special populations: ataxic children [6] and obese subjects [7], surface perturbation during posture [8], effects of sensory information and feedback on postural control [9,10], elderly behavior during a motor-motor double task [11], upper limb control [12,13], different aspects related to running: ankle joint dynamic stiffness [14] and fatigue [15]. There is also a flash on an ecologic condition where a pedestrian has to program its strategy to cross a road in between two moving vehicles [16], and a study on visual-manual control in monkeys [17].…”