Abstract
This study examined adaptive changes of eye-hand coordination during a visuomotor rotation task under the use of terminal visual feedback. Young adults made reaching movements to targets on a digitizer while looking at targets on a monitor where the rotated feedback (a cursor) of hand movements appeared after each movement. Three rotation angles (30°, 75° and 150°) were examined in three groups in order to vary the task difficulty. The results showed that the 30° group gradually reduced direction errors of reaching with practice and adapted well to the visuomotor rotation. The 75° group made large direction errors of reaching, and the 150° group applied a 180° reversal shift from early practice. The 75°and 150° groups, however, overcompensated the respective rotations at the end of practice. Despite these group differences in adaptive changes of reaching, all groups gradually adapted gaze directions prior to reaching from the target area to the areas related to the final positions of reaching during the course of practice. The adaptive changes of both hand and eye movements in all groups mainly reflected adjustments of movement directions based on explicit knowledge of the applied rotation acquired through practice. Only the 30° group showed small implicit adaptation in both effectors. The results suggest that by adapting gaze directions from the target to the final position of reaching based on explicit knowledge of the visuomotor rotation, the oculomotor system supports the limb-motor system to make precise preplanned adjustments of reaching directions during learning of visuomotor rotation under terminal visual feedback.
Highlights
Various gaze behaviors during manual actions are established through extensive practice in daily life to enable an effective flow of visual information for planning and execution of skillful actions
The present study examined adaptive changes of reaching movements and gaze patterns during learning of a visuomotor rotation with three different rotation angles (30°, 75° and 150°) by using terminal visual feedback
The results showed that (1) the 30° group well adapted hand movements to the applied rotation, whereas the 75° group slightly and the 150° group substantially overcompensated the respective rotations; (2) During practice, all groups gradually shifted gaze directions from the target area to the areas related to the final positions of reaching; (3) All groups increased correlation between gaze and hand directions in early practice but gradually decreased thereafter; (4) The adaptive changes of both hand and eye movements mainly reflected explicit learning in all groups, whereas only the 30° group showed small implicit adaptation in both movements
Summary
Various gaze behaviors during manual actions are established through extensive practice in daily life to enable an effective flow of visual information for planning and execution of skillful actions. Eye-Hand Coordination during Visuomotor Adaptation with Terminal Feedback reaching is completed [8,9,10,11,12] This gaze behavior (called gaze anchoring [10]) is useful to control reaching movement, especially during the homing-in phase, because it places the visual target in fovea as the hand approaches to the target, while temporally removing the added burden of spatial updating for gaze shift [13]. It allows for effective use of visual feedback of both the target and the approaching hand to guide and complete a precise reaching movement [11,12,14,15]
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