Abstract
Active sensing refers to the concept of animals perceiving their environment while involving self-initiated motor acts. As a consequence of these motor acts, this activity produces direct and timely changes in the sensory surface. Is the brain able to take advantage of the precise time-locking that occurs during active sensing? Is the intrinsic predictability present during active sensing, impacting the sensory processes? We conjecture that if stimuli presentation is evoked by a self-initiated motor act, sensory discrimination and timing accuracy would improve. We studied this phenomenon when rats had to locate the position of a brief light stimulus, either when it was elicited by a warning light [passive condition (PC)] or when it was generated by a lever press [active condition (AC)]. We found that during the PC, rats had 66% of correct responses, vs. a significantly higher 77% of correct responses in AC. Furthermore, reaction times reduced from 1,181 ms during AC to 816 ms during PC For the latter condition, the probability of detecting the side of the light stimulus was negatively correlated with the time lag between the motor act and the evoked light and with a 38% reduction on performance per second of delay. These experiment shows that the mechanism that underlies sensory improvement during active behaviors have a constrained time dynamic, where the peak performances occur during the motor act, decreasing proportionally to the lag between the motor act and the stimulus presentation. This result is consistent with the evidence already found in humans, of a precise time dynamic of the improvement of sensory acuity after a motor act and reveals an equivalent process in rodents. Our results support the idea that perception and action are precisely coordinated in the brain.
Highlights
During free behavior conditions, the changes in activities in the sensory organs are, more often than not, the result of self-initiated actions
This study suggested that the local field potential (LFP) modulations observed in V1 during eye movement are more strongly coupled to saccade onset, than to the fixation period
We found that the rats performed significantly better in the active than in the passive condition (PC), along with a reduction in reaction times, and that this improvement was dependent on the precise coordination between the motor act and the incoming stimulus
Summary
The changes in activities in the sensory organs are, more often than not, the result of self-initiated actions. This has been interpreted as a mechanism for the attenuation of non-relevant auditory signals associated with movement, which has been recently observed at a behavioral level (Schneider et al, 2018) This evidence suggests that during sensorimotor interactions with the environment, there are neural modulations associated with the movement over sensory cortices, which are precisely coordinated in such a manner that the incoming stimuli activate the sensory areas, concurrently with these self-generated motor signals. Our results support the idea that precisely coordinated action and sensory input impact perception competence
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