Abstract
When a visually guided reaching movement is unexpectedly perturbed, it is implicitly corrected in two ways: immediately after the perturbation by feedback control (online correction) and in the next movement by adjusting feedforward motor commands (offline correction or motor adaptation). Although recent studies have revealed a close relationship between feedback and feedforward controls, the nature of this relationship is not yet fully understood. Here, we show that both implicit online and offline movement corrections utilize the same visuomotor map for feedforward movement control that transforms the spatial location of visual objects into appropriate motor commands. First, we artificially distorted the visuomotor map by applying opposite visual rotations to the cursor representing the hand position while human participants reached for two different targets. This procedure implicitly altered the visuomotor map so that changes in the movement direction to the target location were more insensitive or more sensitive. Then, we examined how such visuomotor map distortion influenced online movement correction by suddenly changing the target location. The magnitude of online movement correction was altered according to the shape of the visuomotor map. We also examined offline movement correction; the aftereffect induced by visual rotation in the previous trial was modulated according to the shape of the visuomotor map. These results highlighted the importance of the visuomotor map as a foundation for implicit motor control mechanisms and the intimate relationship between feedforward control, feedback control, and motor adaptation.
Footnotes
↵1 The authors report no conflict of interest.
↵3 This work was supported by a grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Research Fellowships for Young Scientists to T.H. (6242062) and by KAKENHI (26242062) to D.N. We thank K. Takiyama and members of the Nozaki laboratory for helpful comments and suggestions, and Kanae Abe, Yasuko Shinya, and Asako Munakata for coordinating the experiments.
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