Physically interacting humans regulate muscle coactivation to improve visuo-haptic perception

Abstract

Our results reveal that interacting humans inconspicuously modulate muscle activation to extract accurate information about the common target while considering their own and the partner’s sensorimotor noise. A novel computational model was developed to decipher the underlying mechanism: muscle coactivation is adapted to combine haptic information from the interaction with the partner and own visual information in a stochastically optimal manner. This improves the prediction of the target position with minimal metabolic cost in each partner, resulting in the lead of the partner with the most accurate visual information.