The Role of Visual Feedback and Age When Grasping, Transferring and Passing Objects in Virtual Environments

ABSTRACT Visual feedback about one’s own movements can be important for effective performance in natural and computer-generated environments. Previous work suggested that, for young adults, performance in virtual environments was influenced by the presence of a crude representation of the hand in a task-specific fashion. The current study was performed to determine whether this pattern of results holds across the lifespan. Specifically, we were interested in determining whether a representation of the hand is useful for movement performance in children, middle adults, and older adults when they reach to grasp an object, transfer it between their two hands, or receive it from a partner. Surprisingly, visual feedback condition had very little effect on performance in the current experiment, with the exception that participants in all three age groups altered how wide they opened their hand when grasping depending on visual condition. Patterns of reach and grasp performance changed across task depending on age, with older adults displaying different patterns than children and middle-aged adults. These results suggest that feedforward planning and the use of feedback are modulated by both age and task.

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