On the Duration of Human Movement: From Self-paced to Slow/Fast Reaches up to Fitts’s Law

In this chapter, we present a mathematical theory of human movement vigor. At the core of the theory is the concept of the cost of time. According to it, natural movement cannot be too slow because the passage of time entails a cost which makes slow moves undesirable. Within this framework, an inverse methodology is available to reliably and robustly characterize how the brain penalizes time from experimental motion data. Yet, a general theory of human movement pace should not only account for the self-selected speed but should also include situations where slow or fast speed instructions are given by an experimenter or required by a task. In particular, the limit case of a “maximal speed” instruction is linked to Fitts’s law, i.e. the speed/accuracy trade-off. This chapter first summarizes the cost of time theory and the procedure used for its accurate identification. Then, the case of slow/fast movements is investigated but changing the duration of goal-directed movements can be done in various ways in this framework. Here we show that only one strategy seems plausible to account for both slow/fast and self-paced reaching movements. By relying upon a free-time optimal control formulation of the motor planning problem, this chapter provides a comprehensive treatment of the linear-quadratic case for single degree of freedom arm movements but the principles are easily extendable to multijoint and/or artificial systems.