The influence of motion signals in hand movements

Abstract

It has been shown that motion after-effects (MAE) may affect the perceived position of moving objects and, more recently, that MAE signals can also affect pursuit eye movements: smooth pursuit eye movements are favoured by the illusory motion percept that is caused by motion adaptation. Here we investigated the relationship between MAE and arm movements. The objective of our research was: (1) to analyze possible effects of MAE when the arm tracks the changing position of a moving object, and (2) to investigate the influence of MAE on pointing movements to both static and moving targets. Our results show that the (unseen) hand position was trailing the target much less when target and MAE direction was the same. At the end of manual pursuit, subjects caught up with the moving target. However, when target direction was opposite the MAE, subjects' hands moved more slowly, causing larger lags between the target and the hand position (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, we found a similar effect of motion signals when subjects pointed to a moving target but found no effect of MAE when pointing to a static object (Experiment 3). We conclude that the effect of motion signals is only revealed when we need to update the changing position of a target.