Spinal stretch reflexes support efficient control of reaching

Abstract

Efficiently controlling the movement of our hand requires coordinating the motion of multiple joints of the arm. Although it is widely assumed that this type of efficient control is implemented by processing that occurs in the cerebral cortex and brain stem, recent work has shown that spinal circuits can generate efficient motor output that supports keeping the hand in a static location. Here, we show that a spinal pathway can also efficiently control the hand during reaching. In our first experiment we applied multi-joint mechanical perturbations to participants elbow and wrist as they began reaching towards a target. We found that spinal stretch reflexes evoked in elbow muscles were not proportional to how much the elbow muscles were stretched but instead were efficiently scaled to the hands distance from the target. In our second experiment we applied the same elbow and wrist perturbations but had participants change how they grasped the manipulandum, diametrically altering how the same wrist perturbation moved the hand relative to the reach target. We found that changing the arms orientation diametrically altered how spinal reflexes in the elbow muscles were evoked, and in such a way that were again efficiently scaled to the hands distance from the target. These findings demonstrate that spinal circuits can help efficiently control the hand during dynamic reaching actions, and show that efficient and flexible motor control is not exclusively dependent on processing that occurs within supraspinal regions of the nervous system.