Tilting Against a Major Theory Of Movement Control

摘要

At first glance, Hiroaki Gomi and Mitsuo Kawato's invention at the ATR Human Information Processing Research Labs in Kyoto, Japan, looks like a computer setup for arm-wrestling. But it's not. They use their apparatus--a semicircular steel table with acomplex system of levers and shafts supporting an armrest above the mirror-smooth surface--to test the strength of the reigning theory about how the brain controls voluntary mpvements of the arm and other limbs. And as Gomi and Kawato report on page 117, the theory, known as the equilibrium point hypothesis, seems to have lost a round.