Study about Rules for the Haptic Control of Locomotion

Abstract

Perceptual psychology suggested that behavior was controlled by information about the world and the self conjointly. The information has now been described. What about the control? In this article, we asserted that locomotion was controlled by rules. Surely, however, they are not rules enforced by an authority. The rules are not commands from a brain; they emerge from the human-environment system.

The objective of this study shows that the rule is not that sensations from the skin and the joints are blended or fused when they occur together, but that the receptors then combine in one system to register one kind of invariant stimulus information. We found that the rule is that the ground reaction force (GRF) vector line is very close to the knee instantaneous axis (KIA). It aligns the knee joint with the GRF such that the reaction forces are torqueless. The reaction to the GRF will then be carried by the whole structures on the body instead.