Abstract
Funding Information: Funding. This work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy EXC 2075 - 390740016 (Project PN2-3A), the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (INTERACT Project, Grant agreement No. 803035), and the Academy of Finland (Hi-Fi BiNDIng Project, #333149).
Highlights
Paraphrasing Sherrington (1924), humans interact and engage with their environment solely through movement. They move thanks to a series of coordinated muscles contractions driven by the firing of alpha motor neurons in the spinal cord. The activity of these neurons, emerges as the result of the interplay between the motor commands generated across the central nervous system (CNS) and the information about the state of the body and of the environment (Enoka, 2015)
An alteration of the sensory organs themselves, or of the interpretation that the CNS makes of the information they provide, can have profound consequences on the aptness of an individual to carry out a motor task
This has obvious repercussions on their capability of interacting with the environment. Those considerations suggest that research on somatosensory integration should follow an interdisciplinary approach, whose methods range from experiments to modeling and whose topics span from basic physiology to rehabilitation, from prosthesis control to biologically-inspired robotics, from human-computer interaction to ergonomics
Summary
Vision is the primary sensory modality for movement, as reflected by the fact that the motor plan can be effectively and systematically perturbed by altering the relationship between the movement environment and the associated visual feedback. Severini and Zych showed that the rotation between visual feedback and motor output results in a congruent, but greedy, rotation of the activation of the muscle synergies associated with the task They showed that the synergies activations are selectively rotated if the visual perturbation engages the workspace of a synergy at its boundaries and a rotation is needed for successfully reaching the target. The authors show that this improvement in motor performance through sub-sensory stimulation is observable during isometric reaching exercises—when visual feedback is not present—but disappears when visual feedback is available, suggesting a primacy of this latter sensory modality over proprioceptive information. This phenomenon is reflected in the occurrence of cortical damages. They authors concluded that the CNS relies on an internal model of Earth gravity effects
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