Abstract
Despite longstanding evidence suggesting a relation between action and perception, the mechanisms underlying their integration are still unclear. It has been proposed that to simplify the sensorimotor integration processes underlying active perception, the central nervous system (CNS) selects patterns of movements aimed at maximizing sampling of task-related sensory input. While previous studies investigated the action-perception loop focusing on the role of higher-level features of motor behavior (e.g., kinematic invariants, effort), the present study explored and quantified the contribution of lower-level organization of motor control. We tested the hypothesis that the coordinated recruitment of group of muscles (i.e., motor modules) engaged to counteract an external force contributes to participants’ perception of the same force. We found that: 1) a model describing the modulation of a subset of motor modules involved in the motor task accounted for about 70% of participants’ perceptual variance; 2) an alternative model, incompatible with the motor modules hypothesis, accounted for significantly lower variance of participants’ detection performance. Our results provide empirical evidence of the potential role played by muscle activation patterns in active perception of force. They also suggest that a modular organization of motor control may mediate not only coordination of multiple muscles, but also perceptual inference.
Highlights
Despite longstanding evidence suggesting a relation between action and perception, the mechanisms underlying their integration are still unclear
We assessed the similarity between a curve describing the across-trials modulation of the force-related synergy (Muscle Synergy Model, muscle synergy model (MSM), curve) and the psychometric curve describing the probability of force detection (Fig. 2c)
We cross-validated the hypothesis that motor modules contribute to force perception by estimating the amount of perceptual variance explained by an alternative model incompatible with the MSM hypothesis, i.e., the Most Contributive Model (MCM)
Summary
Despite longstanding evidence suggesting a relation between action and perception, the mechanisms underlying their integration are still unclear. More recent investigations have supported this view by showing that action-related characteristics of the task – such as effort or biomechanical constraints - can shape the interpretation of the sensory signals underling perceptual decision making[6,7,8] While these previous studies focused their attention on higher level features of motor behavior (e.g., kinematic invariants, effort), the present study investigated whether and to what extent lower-level organization of motor control contributes to active perception. The second model, incompatible with the muscle synergy hypothesis, was generated based on the assumption that concurrent activity of multiple muscles during force production relies on flexible recruitment of individual muscles[12,13] We refer to this model as most contributive model (MCM). Perceptual variance requires only a subset of the muscle synergies recruited in the motor task; and 3) the two muscle models differ in terms of the patterns of muscle activity accounting for the highest amount of perceptual response variance
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