Abstract
The brain generally integrates a multitude of sensory signals to form a unified percept. Even in cursor control tasks, such as reaching while looking at rotated visual feedback on a monitor, visual information on cursor position and proprioceptive information on hand position are partially integrated (sensory coupling), resulting in mutual biases of the perceived positions of cursor and hand. Previous studies showed that the strength of sensory coupling (sum of the mutual biases) depends on the experience of kinematic correlations between hand movements and cursor motions, whereas the asymmetry of sensory coupling (difference between the biases) depends on the relative reliabilities (inverse of variability) of hand-position and cursor-position estimates (reliability rule). Furthermore, the precision of movement control and perception of hand position are known to differ between hands (left, right) and workspaces (ipsilateral, contralateral), and so does the experience of kinematic correlations from daily life activities. Thus, in the present study, we tested whether strength and asymmetry of sensory coupling for the endpoints of reaches in a cursor control task differ between the right and left hand and between ipsilateral and contralateral hemispace. No differences were found in the strength of sensory coupling between hands or between hemispaces. However, asymmetry of sensory coupling was less in ipsilateral than in contralateral hemispace: in ipsilateral hemispace, the bias of the perceived hand position was reduced, which was accompanied by a smaller variability of the estimates. The variability of position estimates of the dominant right hand was also less than for the non-dominant left hand, but this difference was not accompanied by a difference in the asymmetry of sensory coupling – a violation of the reliability rule, probably due a stronger influence of visual information on right-hand movements. According to these results, the long-term effects of the experienced kinematic correlation between hand movements and cursor motions on the strength of sensory coupling are generic and not specific for hemispaces or hands, whereas the effects of relative reliabilities on the asymmetry of sensory coupling are specific for hemispaces but not for hands.
Highlights
We perceive the world and our own body via different sensory modalities
We first report the findings on the explicit measures of the biases of sensed hand and cursor positions, followed by the analysis of the intra-individual variability of these measures
We turn to the comparison of the explicit and implicit measures of the bias of sensed hand position and their variability
Summary
We perceive the world and our own body via different sensory modalities. The brain is faced with the challenge to form a unified percept from multiple signals. Partial multisensory integration, to which we refer as sensory coupling (e.g., Bresciani et al, 2006; Ernst, 2006), has been observed for proprioceptive and visual information that relates to the positions of different and spatially separated objects and has different sources. This is the case in cursor-control tasks (controlling a cursor on a monitor by moving a hand held device) where proprioception refers to the position of the hand in the horizontal plane and vision to the position of the cursor on a roughly vertical monitor screen. We test whether the respective differences between reaching movements in the ipsilateral and contralateral hemispace performed by the right and left hand are associated with different patterns of biases
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