Listing's law for eye, head and arm movements and their synergistic control

✍ Scribed by D. Straumann; Th. Haslwanter; M. -C. Hepp-Reymond; K. Hepp

• Book ID: 104674402
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 734 KB
• Volume: 86
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0014-4819
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00231055

✦ Synopsis

We have recorded eye, head, and upper arm rotations in five healthy human subjects using the three-dimensional search coil technique. Our measurements show that the coordination of eye and head movements during gaze shifts within +/- 25 deg relative to the forward direction is organized by restricting the rotatory trajectories of the two systems to almost parallel planes. These so-called "Listing planes" for eye-in-space and head-in-space rotations are workspace-oriented, not body-fixed. Eye and head trajectories in their respective planes are closely related in direction and amplitude. For pointing or grasping, the rotatory trajectories of the arm are also restricted to a workspace-oriented Listing plane. During visually guided movements, arm follows gaze, and the nine-dimensional rotatory configuration space for eye-head-arm-synergies (three degrees of freedom for each system) is reduced to a two-dimensional plane in the space of quaternion vectors.