Combined influence of visual scene and body tilt on arm pointing movements: gravity matters!

ABSTRACT: Performing accurate actions such as goal-directed arm movements requires taking into account visual and body orientation cues to localize the target in space and produce appropriate reaching motor commands. We experimentally tilted the body and/or the visual scene to investigate how visual and body orientation cues are combined for the control of unseen arm movements. Subjects were asked to point toward a visual target using an upward movement during slow body and/or visual scene tilts. When the scene was tilted, final pointing errors varied as a function of the direction of the scene tilt (forward or backward). Actual forward body tilt resulted in systematic target undershoots, suggesting that the brain may have overcompensated for the biomechanical movement facilitation arising from body

SUBMITTER: Scotto Di Cesare C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4055731 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature