Event-related potentials were recorded while infants observe congruent or incongruent grasping actions at the age when organized grasping first emerges (4-6 months of age). We demonstrate that the event-related potential component P400 encodes the congruency of power grasps at the age of 6 months (Experiment 1) and in 5-month-old infants that have developed the ability to use power grasps (Expe...

ion and control for groups of fully-actuated planar robots Calin Belta and Vijay Kumar GRASP Laboratory University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 fcalin, [email protected]

We propose a novel data-driven animation method for the synthesis of natural looking human grasping. Motion data captured from human grasp actions is used to train a probabilistic model of the human grasp space. This model greatly reduces the high number of degrees of freedom of the human hand to a few dimensions in a continuous grasp space. The low dimensionality of the grasp space in turn all...

In studying grasping and manipulation we find two very different approaches to the subject: knowledge-based approaches based primarily on empirical studies of human grasping and manipulation, and analytical approaches based primarily on physical models of the manipulation process. This chapter begins with a review of studies of human grasping, in particular our development of a grasp taxonomy a...

This paper presents a personal account of how a PhD supervisor came to an understanding of an approach to research that was unfamiliar to him. Additionally it addresses the question of what makes the approach, in this case bricolage, an acceptable format for academic work and in particular PhD study. Bricolage is a relatively little used approach to research; therefore, researchers utilizing br...

Modern intellectual discourse is still under the spell of the Heideggerian project. Once it had broken away from its German moorings Heideggerian thought proliferated and was received into non-German cultures. Their intellectual elites appropriated it according to their own reading of Heideggerian texts. While they came to divergent and often contradictory conclusions about the philosophical an...

The 2003 APA Division 30 Definition of Hypnosis (Div30Def; Green, Barabasz, Barrett, & Montgomery, 2005) was the outcome of an attempt “to forge a definition that was first and foremost empirically-based, theoretically neutral, and relatively concise and ‘user friendly’ to promote widespread acceptance among clinicians, researchers, and the lay public alike” (p. 261). In setting out the procedu...

Coordinated reach-to-grasp movements require precise spatiotemporal synchrony between proximal forelimb muscles (shoulder, elbow) that transport the hand toward a target during reach, and distal muscles (wrist, digit) that simultaneously preshape and orient the hand for grasp. The precise mechanisms through which the redundant neuromuscular circuitry coordinates reach with grasp, however, remai...

The Dual Visuomotor Channel Theory proposes that manual prehension consists of two temporally integrated movements, each subserved by distinct visuomotor pathways in occipitoparietofrontal cortex. The Reach is mediated by a dorsomedial pathway and transports the hand in relation to the target's extrinsic properties (i.e., location and orientation). The Grasp is mediated by a dorsolateral pathwa...