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Visuomotor associations facilitate movement preparation.

ABSTRACT: Many motor skills require rapidly choosing a movement goal and preparing a movement to that goal, such as in sports where circumstances often change quickly and many actions are possible. Humans can benefit from learning the perceptual cues that predict the requirements of movement so that the choice of a movement goal and movement preparation can occur earlier. However, there remains uncertainty about how these perceptual cues are learned. Here we investigate the use and learning of these perceptual-motor associations. First, we ask if episodic memory for associations can support learning. In Experiment 1, participants first memorized associations between symbols and movement goals. When these symbols were subsequently presented as cues, reaching movements were prepared as efficiently as if the goals themselves were previewed, without the need for additional practice. Next, we ask whether statistical learning can be used to learn the associations. In Experiment 2, participants had to learn the associations during the movement task itself. This learning enabled efficient movement preparation, and the rate of improvement scaled with the number and complexity of associations. These findings suggest that movement preparation can be facilitated by perceptual cues via statistical learning and memory recall, highlighting a potential role for learning and memory systems not conventionally implicated in motor behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

SUBMITTER: Huberdeau DM

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8384084 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Eye-movement patterns are often utilized in studies of visual perception as indices of the specific information extracted to efficiently process a given stimulus during a given task. Our prior work, however, revealed that not only the stimulus and task influence eye-movements, but that visuomotor (start position) factors also robustly and characteristically influence eye-movement patterns to faces (Arizpe et al., 2012). Here we manipulated lateral starting side and distance from the midline of face and line-symmetrical control (butterfly) stimuli in order to further investigate the nature and generality of such visuomotor influences. First we found that increasing starting distance from midline (4°, 8°, 12°, and 16° visual angle) strongly and proportionately increased the distance of the first ordinal fixation from midline. We did not find influences of starting distance on subsequent fixations, however, suggesting that eye-movement plans are not strongly affected by starting distance following an initial orienting fixation. Further, we replicated our prior effect of starting side (left, right) to induce a spatially contralateral tendency of fixations after the first ordinal fixation. However, we also established that these visuomotor influences did not depend upon the predictability of the location of the upcoming stimulus, and were present not only for face stimuli but also for our control stimulus category (butterflies). We found a correspondence in overall left-lateralized fixation tendency between faces and butterflies. Finally, for faces, we found a relationship between left starting side (right sided fixation pattern tendency) and increased recognition performance, which likely reflects a cortical right hemisphere (left visual hemifield) advantage for face perception. These results further indicate the importance of considering and controlling for visuomotor influences in the design, analysis, and interpretation of eye-movement studies.

Project description:BACKGROUND:Successful hand-object interactions require precise hand-eye coordination with continual movement adjustments. Quantitative measurement of this visuomotor behaviour could provide valuable insight into upper limb impairments. The Gaze and Movement Assessment (GaMA) was developed to provide protocols for simultaneous motion capture and eye tracking during the administration of two functional tasks, along with data analysis methods to generate standard measures of visuomotor behaviour. The objective of this study was to investigate the reproducibility of the GaMA protocol across two independent groups of non-disabled participants, with different raters using different motion capture and eye tracking technology. METHODS:Twenty non-disabled adults performed the Pasta Box Task and the Cup Transfer Task. Upper body and eye movements were recorded using motion capture and eye tracking, respectively. Measures of hand movement, angular joint kinematics, and eye gaze were compared to those from a different sample of twenty non-disabled adults who had previously performed the same protocol with different technology, rater and site. RESULTS:Participants took longer to perform the tasks versus those from the earlier study, although the relative time of each movement phase was similar. Measures that were dissimilar between the groups included hand distances travelled, hand trajectories, number of movement units, eye latencies, and peak angular velocities. Similarities included all hand velocity and grip aperture measures, eye fixations, and most peak joint angle and range of motion measures. DISCUSSION:The reproducibility of GaMA was confirmed by this study, despite a few differences introduced by learning effects, task demonstration variation, and limitations of the kinematic model. GaMA accurately quantifies the typical behaviours of a non-disabled population, producing precise quantitative measures of hand function, trunk and angular joint kinematics, and associated visuomotor behaviour. This work advances the consideration for use of GaMA in populations with upper limb sensorimotor impairment.

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Visuomotor associations facilitate movement preparation.

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