Abstract

The hand is one of the most fascinating and sophisticated biological motor systems. The complex biomechanical and neural architecture of the hand poses challenging questions for understanding the control strategies that underlie the coordination of finger movements and forces required for a wide variety of behavioral tasks, ranging from multi-digit grasping to the individuated movements of single digits. We have used intramuscular electromyography to infer how multiple hand muscles are controlled during grasping tasks and determine whether the underlying neural coordination patterns (common input to motor units are task-dependent. Our results suggest that the organization of neural common input to motor units is muscle-pair specific rather than task-dependent. Such distribution might reflect the functional role of specific muscle pairs for object grasping and manipulation.