Humans underestimate the movement range of their own hands

Abstract

Motor planning and motor imagery are assumed to use veridical internal representations of the biomechanical properties of our limbs. Here, we report that people underestimate their hands’ range of motion. We used two tasks probing representations of own motion range, estimation and imagery, in which participants were supposed to judge their rotational hand movement ranges. In both tasks participants’ judgments were underestimated in three out of four cardinal directions. We suggest that this representational bias provides an optimal balance between movement efficiency and safety in face of the inherently stochastic nature of movement execution. Individuals underestimate the range of their own hand movements in three of four cardinal directions. The underestimation bias is larger in the nondominant hand.