Visual and proprioceptive recalibrations after exposure to a visuomotor rotation

Abstract

Adaptation to a visuomotor rotation in a cursor‐control task is accompanied by proprioceptive recalibration, whereas the existence of visual recalibration is uncertain and has even been doubted. In the present study, we tested both visual and proprioceptive recalibration; proprioceptive recalibration was not only assessed by means of psychophysical judgments of the perceived position of the hand, but also by an indirect procedure based on movement characteristics. Participants adapted to a gradually introduced visuomotor rotation of 30° by making center‐out movements to remembered targets. In subsequent test trials, they made center‐out movements without visual feedback or observed center‐out motions of a cursor without moving the hand. In each test trial, they judged the endpoint of hand or cursor by matching the position of the hand or of a visual marker, respectively, moving along a semicircular path. This path ran through all possible endpoints of the center‐out movements. We observed proprioceptive recalibration of 7.3° (3.1° with the indirect procedure) and a smaller, but significant, visual recalibration of 1.3°. Total recalibration of 8.6° was about half as strong as motor adaptation, the adaptive shift of the movement direction. The evidence of both proprioceptive and visual recalibration was obtained with a judgment procedure that suggests that recalibration is restricted to the type of movement performed during exposure to a visuomotor rotation. Consequently, identical physical positions of the hand can be perceived differently depending on how they have been reached, and similarly identical positions of a cursor on a monitor can be perceived differently.

Visuo-proprioceptive integration and recalibration with multiple visual stimuli

“…Firstly, the proprioceptive integration bias with two visual stimuli was clearly smaller than in a condition with the synchronous visual stimulus only as in experiment 2 and as observed previously (Debats and Heuer 2018b). Similarly, the proprioceptive recalibration bias with two visual signals that we observed here, amounted to about 7% of the visuo-proprioceptive offset only and was smaller than the order of 20% typically found with single visual stimuli (Henriques and Cressman 2012;Barkley et al 2014;Zbib et al 2016;Rand and Heuer 2019). This suggests that both visual stimuli influenced the recalibration process in the present study.…”

“…This result is consistent with the notion that motor adaptation and proprioceptive recalibration are partially independent processes (cf. Henriques 2009, 2010;Izawa et al 2012;Rand and Heuer 2019).…”

Suppression of mutually incompatible proprioceptive and visual action effects in tool use

“…As outlined above, the neglect of the less relevant action effects in a given block and the modulation of this through (in)compatibility of resident and remote effects was independent of the judgment modality, thus whether visual or proprioceptive estimates had to be made. Additionally though, we also found no significant differences between absolute estimation errors of the two judgment modalities in the experimental blocks which is surprising given the common finding that people are usually much better in judging visual compared to proprioceptive positions [22,[27][28][29][30], though we did find a significant effect of this factor in the exploratory single-trial analyses. However, this might be due to the significant crossed judgment modality x compatibility interaction which indicated not only a compatibility effect for the proprioceptive judgments, but also that these were both less precise than visual judgments in the incompatible condition, while being more precise than visual judgments in the compatible condition.…”

Active inference under visuo-proprioceptive conflict: Simulation and empirical results

“…(2020) 10:4010 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-61097-w www.nature.com/scientificreports www.nature.com/scientificreports/ 'attentional set' [48][49][50] can influence the precision afforded to vision or proprioception during action, and thus prioritize either modality for the current behavioural context. Several studies have shown that visuo-proprioceptive recalibration is context dependent; in that either vision or proprioception may be the 'dominant' modality-with corresponding recalibration of the 'non-dominant' modality 9,10,48,[51][52][53][55][56][57] . Thus, our results lend tentative support to arguments that visuo-proprioceptive (or visuo-motor) adaptation and recalibration can be enhanced by increasing the precision of visual information (attending to vision 48,51 ).…”