Haptic Guidance Improves the Visuo-Manual Tracking of Trajectories

Background: Learning to perform new movements is usually achieved by following visual demonstrations. Haptic guidance by a force feedback device is a recent and original technology which provides additional proprioceptive cues during visuo-motor learning tasks. The effects of two types of haptic guidances-control in position (HGP) or in force (HGF)–on visuo-manual tracking (“following”) of trajectories are still under debate. Methodology/Principals Findings: Three training techniques of haptic guidance (HGP, HGF or control condition, NHG, without haptic guidance) were evaluated in two experiments. Movements produced by adults were assessed in terms of shapes (dynamic time warping) and kinematics criteria (number of velocity peaks and mean velocity) before and after the training sessions. Trajectories consisted of two Arabic and two Japanese-inspired letters in Experiment 1 and ellipses in Experiment 2. We observed that the use of HGF globally improves the fluency of the visuo-manual tracking of trajectories while no significant improvement was found for HGP or NHG. Conclusion/Significance: These results show that the addition of haptic information, probably encoded in force coordinates, play a crucial role on the visuo-manual tracking of new trajectories.