Human impedance modulation to improve visuo-haptic perception

Humans activate muscles to shape the mechanical interaction with their environment, but can they harness this control mechanism to best sense the environment? We investigated how participants adapt their muscle activation to visual and haptic information when tracking a randomly moving target with a robotic interface. The results exhibit a differentiated effect of these sensory modalities, where participants' muscle coactivation increases with the haptic noise and decreases with the visual noise, in apparent contradiction to previous results. These results can be explained when considering muscle spring-like mechanics, where stiffness increases with coactivation to regulate motion guidance. Increasing coactivation to more closely follow the motion plan favors accurate visual over haptic information, while decreasing it filters visual noise and relies more on accurate haptic information. We formulated this active sensing mechanism as the optimization of visuo-haptic information and effort. This optimal information and effort (OIE) model can explain the adaptation of muscle activity to unimodal and multimodal sensory information when interacting with fixed or dynamic environments, or with another human, and can be used to optimize human-robot interaction.