Wrist Posture Does Not Influence Finger Interdependence

Abstract

A task involving an instructed finger movement causes involuntary movements in the noninstructed fingers of the hand, also known as finger interdependence. It is associated with both mechanical and neural mechanisms. The current experiment investigated the effect of finger interdependence due to systematic changes of the wrist posture, close to neutral. Eight right-handed healthy human participants performed submaximal cyclic flexion and extension at the metacarpophalangeal joint at 0° neutral, 30° extension, and 30° flexion wrist postures, respectively. The experiment comprised of an instruction to move one of the 4 fingers—index, middle, ring, and little. Movements of the instructed and noninstructed fingers were recorded. Finger interdependence was quantified using enslavement matrix, individuation index, and stationarity index, and it was compared across wrist postures. The authors found that the finger interdependence does not change with changes in wrist posture. Further analysis showed that individuation and stationarity indices were mostly equivalent across wrist postures, and their effects were much smaller than the average differences present among the fingers. The authors conclude that at wrist postures close to neutral, the finger interdependence is not affected by wrist posture.