Abstract
Movement corrections to somatosensory targets have been found to be shorter in latency and larger in magnitude than corrections to external visual targets. Somatosensory targets (e.g., body positions) can be identified using both tactile (i.e., skin receptors) and proprioceptive information (e.g., the sense of body position derived from sensory organs in the muscles and joints). Here, we investigated whether changes in tactile information alone, without changes in proprioception, can elicit shorter correction latencies and larger correction magnitudes than those to external visual targets. Participants made reaching movements to a myofilament touching the index finger of the non-reaching finger (i.e., a tactile target) and a light-emitting diode (i.e., visual target). In one-third of the trials, target perturbations occurred 100 ms after movement onset, such that the target was displaced 3 cm either away or toward the participant. We found that participants demonstrated larger correction magnitudes to visual than tactile target perturbations. Moreover, we found no differences in correction latency between movements to perturbed tactile and visual targets. Further, we found that while participants detected tactile stimuli earlier than visual stimuli, they took longer to initiate reaching movements to an unperturbed tactile target than an unperturbed visual target. These results provide evidence that additional processes may be required when planning movements to tactile versus visual targets and that corrections to changes in tactile target positions alone may not facilitate the latency and magnitude advantages observed for corrections to somatosensory targets (i.e., proprioceptive-tactile targets).
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The datasets collected and used for the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (Grant no: 302419); Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Grant no: RGPIN-2020-05831); Canada Foundation for Innovation (Grant no: 302419).
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Communicated by Melvyn A. Goodale.
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Abdulrabba, S., Tremblay, L. & Manson, G.A. Investigating the online control of goal-directed actions to a tactile target on the body. Exp Brain Res 240, 2773–2782 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-022-06445-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-022-06445-0