Use of coactivation to expedite flexible control

Establish how the nervous system deploys muscle coactivation to expedite flexible, task-dependent feedback control during voluntary movements, including the strategy for shifting reliance from transcortical pathways to faster spinal and subcortical circuits.

Background

Coactivation is proposed to enable rapid excitation/inhibition across agonist and antagonist muscles and to facilitate faster torque generation, potentially shifting reliance toward faster spinal or subcortical feedback.

The paper explicitly notes that it is unclear how the nervous system uses coactivation to expedite such flexible control.