Does movement planning follow Fitts' law? Scaling anticipatory postural adjustments with movement speed and accuracy.

We wanted to determine whether movement planning followed Fitts’ law by investigating the relationship between movement planning and movement performance in experienced dancers executing a typical classical ballet step in which the big toe was pointed to targets at different distances and of different widths so as to obtain several indices of difficulty (ID). Movement time, velocity and variability at the target were the variables of movement performance kinematics; movement planning was evaluated by analysis of anticipatory postural adjustments (APAs) to assess their modulation at different IDs. Movement time and peak of velocity were found to scale with the ID only when individual movement distance across target widths was entered into the analysis. APA magnitude and duration both scaled according to movement parameters but not in the same way. APA magnitude scaled with movement velocity, while APA duration was sensitive to the amplitude-to-accuracy ratio following the ID for movements performed in the shortest time interval when on-line feedback control is probably not available. Here we show that timing of muscle activation acts as an independent central command that triggers fine-tuning for speed-accuracy trade-off.