Sensory Integration Does Not Lead to Sensory Calibration

One generally has the impression that one feels one's hand at the same location as one sees it. However, because our brain deals with possibly conflicting visual and proprioceptive information about hand position by combining it into an optimal estimate of the hand's location, mutual calib...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 103; no. 49; pp. 18781 - 18786
Main Authors Smeets, Jeroen B. J., van den Dobbelsteen, John J., de Grave, Denise D. J., van Beers, Robert J., Brenner, Eli
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 05.12.2006
National Acad Sciences
Subjects
Adaptation
Adaptation, Physiological
Behavioral neuroscience
Biological Sciences
Calibration
Cubes
Experimentation
Hands
Humans
Integration
Modeling
Models, Neurological
Neurons
Predictive Value of Tests
Proprioception
Proprioception - physiology
Senses
Social Sciences
Statistical discrepancies
Visual perception
Visual Perception - physiology
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Summary:One generally has the impression that one feels one's hand at the same location as one sees it. However, because our brain deals with possibly conflicting visual and proprioceptive information about hand position by combining it into an optimal estimate of the hand's location, mutual calibration is not necessary to achieve such a coherent percept. Does sensory integration nevertheless entail sensory calibration? We asked subjects to move their hand between visual targets. Blocks of trials without any visual feedback about their hand's position were alternated with blocks with veridical visual feedback. Whenever vision was removed, individual subjects' hands slowly drifted toward the same position to which they had drifted on previous blocks without visual feedback. The time course of the observed drift depended in a predictable manner (assuming optimal sensory combination) on the variable errors in the blocks with and without visual feedback. We conclude that the optimal use of unaligned sensory information, rather than changes within either of the senses or an accumulation of execution errors, is the cause of the frequently observed movement drift. The conclusion that seeing one's hand does not lead to an alignment between vision and proprioception has important consequences for the interpretation of previous work on visuomotor adaptation.
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Present address: Department Physics of Man, Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht University, NL-3584 CC, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Edited by Dale Purves, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, and approved October 9, 2006
Author contributions: J.B.J.S. and J.J.v.d.D. designed research; J.B.J.S., D.D.J.d.G., and R.J.v.B. performed research; J.B.J.S. and R.J.v.B. analyzed data; and J.B.J.S., R.J.v.B., and E.B. wrote the paper.
Present address: Department of Biomechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, NL-2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.0607687103