The progressive acquisition of manipulative skill is an important developmental milestone. It provides infants with an increasing set of opportunities for knowing the external world and for acquiring abilities also relevant to other domains, most especially social interaction. The ability to use the hands to grasp and extend an object in a directed fashion toward an interlocutor facilitates the...

Despite the building of a number of complex robot hands in the last two decades, there have been few experimental demonstrations of robot hand dexterity. This paper outlines several key issues associated with precision manipulation for robot hands. \Precision ma-nipulation" is deened as the control of grasped object position and applied force using nger-tip contacts alone. The approach taken is...

Hand preference develops in the first two postnatal years with nearly half of infants exhibiting a consistent early preference for acquiring objects. Others exhibit a more variable developmental trajectory but by the end of their second postnatal year, most exhibit a consistent hand preference for role-differentiated bimanual manipulation. According to some forms of embodiment theory, these dif...

Advances in tactile cognition and haptics have increased our understanding of the multimodal nature of touch. Haptic data is mostly confined to human performance arising from the flexibility and dexterity of the fingers used to discriminate shapes and objects. Studies with infants indicate that recognition of objects either seen or held in the hand is possible during early periods of infancy. E...

We describe a three-dimensional human-computer interface for neurosurgical visualization. The interface is based on the two-handed physical manipulation of hand-held tools, or "props", in free space. These user interface "props" facilitate transfer of the user's skills for manipulating tools with two hands to the operation of a user interface for visualizing 3D medical images, without need for ...