TY - JOUR T1 - Speeded Reaching Movements around Invisible Obstacles A1 - Hudson, Todd E. A1 - Wolfe, Uta A1 - Maloney, Laurence T. Y1 - 2012/09/20 N2 - Author Summary In everyday, cluttered environments, moving to reach or grasp an object can result in unintended collisions with other objects along the path of movement. Depending on what we run into (a priceless Ming vase, a crotchety colleague) we can suffer serious monetary or social consequences. It makes sense to choose movement trajectories that trade off the value of reaching a goal against the consequences of unintended collisions along the way. In the research described here, subjects made speeded movements to touch targets while avoiding obstacles placed along the natural reach trajectory. There were explicit monetary rewards for hitting the target and explicit monetary costs for accidentally hitting the intervening obstacle. We varied the cost and location of the obstacle across conditions. The task was to earn as large a monetary bonus as possible, which required that reaches curve around obstacles only to the extent justified by the location and cost of the obstacle. We compared human performance in this task to that of a Bayesian movement planner who maximized expected gain on each trial. In most conditions, but not all, movement strategies were close to optimal. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 8 IS - 9 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002676 SP - e1002676 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002676 ER -