Human Exteroception during Object Handling with an Upper Limb Exoskeleton.

Upper limb exoskeletons may confer significant mechanical advantages across a range of tasks. The potential consequences of the exoskeleton upon the user's sensorimotor capacities however, remain poorly understood. The purpose of this study was to examine how the physical coupling of the user's arm to an upper limb exoskeleton influenced the perception of handheld objects.

Evidence for an internal model of friction when controlling kinetic energy at impact to slide an object along a surface toward a target.

Although the role of an internal model of gravity for the predictive control of the upper limbs is quite well established, evidence is lacking regarding an internal model of friction. In this study, 33 male and female human participants performed a striking movement (with the index finger) to slide a plastic cube-like object to a given target distance. The surface material (aluminum or balsa wood) on which the object slides, the surface slope (-10°, 0, or +10°) and the target distance (25 cm or 50 cm) varied across conditions, with ten successive trials in each condition.

Social Contact Acts as Appetitive Reinforcement and Supports Associative Learning in Honeybees.

Social learning is taxonomically widespread in the animal kingdom [1], and although it is long thought to be a hallmark of vertebrates, recent studies revealed that it also exists in insects [2-5]. The adaptive functions of social learning are well known, but its underlying mechanisms remain debated [2, 5, 6]. Social insects critically depend on the social transmission of information for successful food search and their colonies' fitness [7] and are tractable models for studying the social cues and cognitive mechanisms involved [2-5].