The sources of variability in the time course of reaching movements

Movement variability plays a vital role in motor control. Although previous studies have examined the size and direction of the variability at end points, little research has examined how the variability changes during the time of move. The time course of the variability on point-to-point movements seems to be composed of two different properties: one increases monotonically and the other has an increasing–decreasing property. The first one can be explained by neural noise at the control level, such as the signal-dependent noise (SDN). However, how do we explain the latter one? Our numerical experiment hypothesized the time-jitter noise at trajectory planning level, which represents local advance or delay time of the reference trajectory for reaching movements. The simulation result could well reproduce the feature of the behavioral results. D 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V.