Measurement of the relationship between weight perception and upper limb movement

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated the relationship between motion of the human upper limb and weight perception during weight lifting experiments in a real environment. The weight lifting experiments were completed with and without elbow restraints and with various lifting heights. In the lifting experiments, subjects evaluated their perceptions of the lifted weight by the magnitude estimation method. Psychometric and psychophysical magnitude functions were computed according to subject's evaluation results. The slope of the psychometric function and the modality characteristic exponent were quantitatively analyzed for our experimental conditions. The results indicate that these quantities increase proportionally to lifting height. The results of this study demonstrate that weight perception in human is closely related to the motion of the upper limb.