Body-Related Visual Biasing Affects Accuracy of Reaching

Abstract

Background: Many daily activities depend on visual inputs to improve motor accuracy and minimize errors. Reaching tasks present an ecological framework for examining these visuomotor interactions, but our comprehension of how different amounts of visual input affect motor outputs is still limited. The present study fills this gap, exploring how hand-related visual bias affects motor performance in a reaching task (to draw a line between two dots). Methods: Our setup allowed us to show and hide the visual feedback related to the hand position (cursor of a computer mouse), which was further disentangled from the visual input related to the task (tip of the line). Results: Data from 53 neurotypical participants indicated that, when the hand-related visual cue was visible and disentangled from the task-related visual cue, accommodating movements in response to spatial distortions were less accurate than when the visual cue was absent. Conclusions: We interpret these findings with reference to the concepts of motor affordance of visual cues, shifts between internally- and externally-oriented cognitive strategies to perform movements, and body-related reference frames.