Abstract
According to theories of anticipatory behavior control, actions are initiated by predicting their sensory outcomes. From the perspective of event-predictive cognition and active inference, predictive processes activate currently desired events and event boundaries, as well as the expected sensorimotor mappings necessary to realize them, dependent on the involved predicted uncertainties before actual motor control unfolds. Accordingly, we asked whether peripersonal hand space is remapped in an uncertainty anticipating manner while grasping and placing bottles in a virtual reality (VR) setup. To investigate, we combined the crossmodal congruency paradigm with virtual object interactions in two experiments. As expected, an anticipatory crossmodal congruency effect (aCCE) at the future finger position on the bottle was detected. Moreover, a manipulation of the visuo-motor mapping of the participants’ virtual hand while approaching the bottle selectively reduced the aCCE at movement onset. Our results support theories of event-predictive, anticipatory behavior control and active inference, showing that expected uncertainties in movement control indeed influence anticipatory stimulus processing.
Highlights
Over the recent decades, the nervous system has been progressively viewed as a predictive inference machine, rather than a mere information processor [1,2,3]—a perspective that dates back to Hermann von Helmholtz, who considered perception to be an inference process
While it remains open to which degree shifts in spatial attention alone can account for these findings [30,31], these results show that multisensory processing in spatial body representations is modulated by action possibilities and intentions, mapping the space that can be interacted with onto according behavior [32]
This notion is in line with results from recent studies that have shown anticipatory remapping of peripersonal hand space (PPHS) during goal-directed object grasps [33,34] and pantomimic object manipulations [35]—light stimuli at the target object, close to where the fingers will get in contact with it, selectively interacted with the perception of vibrotactile stimuli on the fingers even before the hand started to move toward the target
Summary
The nervous system has been progressively viewed as a predictive inference machine, rather than a mere information processor [1,2,3]—a perspective that dates back to Hermann von Helmholtz, who considered perception to be an inference process. While it remains open to which degree shifts in spatial attention alone can account for these findings [30,31], these results show that multisensory processing in spatial body representations is modulated by action possibilities and intentions, mapping the space that can be interacted with onto according behavior [32] This notion is in line with results from recent studies that have shown anticipatory remapping of PPHS during goal-directed object grasps [33,34] and pantomimic object manipulations [35]—light stimuli at the target object, close to where the fingers will get in contact with it, selectively interacted with the perception of vibrotactile stimuli on the fingers even before the hand started to move toward the target. As a result, following theories of event-predictive, active inference, we expected that this manipulation would affect the magnitude of the aCCE, especially at movement onset, when the discrepancy between vision and proprioception is about to, and anticipated to, become apparent
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