Effects of response type on coordinated responses during arm movement

This paper reports some experimental results on the coordination of finger and vocal responses with passing through a target position in multijoint arm movement. In Experiment 1, we found that the dif-ference in the timing of finger and vocal responses cannot be attributed entirely to efferent or repre-sentational effects. Instead, it appears to reflect the extent to which information about the internal stimuli generated by the arm movement are available to the centers controlling these different re-sponses. That is, it is a compatibility effect. In Experiment 2, the case in which a finger response is made on the same side of the body as the moving arm was compared with the case in which it is made with the contralateral hand, which remains static. The interaction effect observed suggests that the pathways subserving coordinated responses are informationally encapsulated, so that information about arm movement is not shared between the neural centers controlling different coordinated responses.