Reach-to-Grasp Behavior

Reaching for objects in our surroundings is an everyday activity that most humans perform seamlessly a hundred times a day. It is nonetheless a complex behavior that requires the perception of objects' features, action selection, movement planning, multi-joint coordination, force regulation, and the integration of all of these properties during the actions themselves to meet the successful demands of extremely varied task goals. Even though reach-to-grasp behavior has been studied for decades, it has, in recent years, become a particularly growing area of multidisciplinary research because of its crucial role in activities of daily living and broad range of applications to other fields, including physical rehabilitation, prosthetics, and robotics. This volume brings together novel and exciting research that sheds light into the complex sensory-motor processes involved in the selection and production of reach-to-grasp behaviors. It also offers a unique life-span and multidisciplinary perspective on the development and multiple processes involved in the formation of reach-to-grasp. It covers recent and exciting discoveries from the fields of developmental psychology and learning sciences, neurophysiology and brain sciences, movement sciences, and the dynamic field of developmental robotics, which has become a very active applied field relying on biologically inspired models. This volume is a rich and valuable resource for students and professionals in all of these research fields, as well as cognitive sciences, rehabilitation, and other applied sciences.

Daniela Corbetta is a Professor of Developmental Psychology and the Director of the Infant Perception-Action Laboratory at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, USA. Marco Santello is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Director of the Neural Control of Movement Laboratory at Arizona State University in Tempe, USA.

Part I: Developmental Studies on the Origins and Acquisition of Reach-to-Grasp 1. Goal Directed Behaviours: The Development of Pre-Natal Touch Behaviours Nadja Reissland and Joe Austin 2. Learning to Reach in Infancy Daniela Corbetta, Rebecca F. Wiener, and Sabrina L. Thurman 3. Multiple Motor Channel Theory and the Development of Skilled Hand Movements in Human Infants Jenni M. Karl, Lori-Ann R. Sacrey, and Ian Q. Whishaw 4. The Development of Anticipatory Planning Skills in 3- to 12-year-old Children Matthias Weigelt Part II: Neurophysiological Bases of Reaching, Grasping, and Action Selection 5. Neural Circuits for Action Selection Paul Cisek and David Thura 6. How Separate Are Reaching and Grasping? Adam G. Rouse, Kevin A. Mazurek, Zheng Liu, Gil Rivlis, and Marc H. Schieber 7. Representing Visual Information in Motor Terms for Grasp Control Kenneth F. Valyear Part III: On the Planning and Control of Reach-to-Grasp Behavior in Adults 8. The Control of the Reach-to-Grasp Movement Jeroen B.J. Smeets and Eli Brenner 9. Reach-to-Grasp Movements: Testing the Cognitive Architecture of Action Umberto Castiello 10. Sensorimotor Integration Associated with Transport-Aperture Coordination and Tool-Mediated Reaching Miya K. Rand and Yury P. Shimansky 11. Dexterous Manipulation: Bridging the Gap Between Hand Kinematics and Kinetics Marco Santello Part IV: Reach-to-Grasp in Developmental Robotics: Issues and Modelling 12. Reaching for Objects: A Neural Process Account in a Developmental Perspective Gregor Schöner, Jan Tekülke, and Stephan Zibner 13. The Development of Reaching and Grasping: Towards an Integrated Framework Based on a Critical Review of Computational and Robotic Models Daniele Caligiore and Gianluca Baldassarre 14. Reaching and Grasping: What We Can Learn from Psychology and Robotics Philippe Gaussier and Alexandre Pitti