Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recently developed models of reaching have been based on the general principle that an actor first specifies a task goal, then plans a goal posture that can achieve the task, and then specifies a movement to that goal posture. Selection of a particular goal posture is based on the degree to which movement from the starting posture to possible candidate goal postures best satisfies a number of constraints, including biomechanical efficiency and the avoidance of obstacles. We describe methods used to simulate and test this model.