Integration of visual and somatosensory target information in goal-directed eye and arm movements

In this study, we compared separate and coordinated eye and hand movements towards visual or somatosensory target stimuli in a dark room, where no visual position information about the hand could be obtained. Experiment 1 showed that saccadic reaction times (RTs) were longer when directed to somatosensory targets than when directed to visual targets in both single- and dual-task conditions. However, for hand movements, this pattern was only found in the dual-task condition and not in the single-task condition. Experiment 1 also showed that correlations between saccadic and hand RTs were significantly higher when directed towards somatosensory targets than when directed towards visual targets. Importantly, experiment 2 indicated that this was not caused by differences in processing times at a perceptual level. Furthermore, hand-pointing accuracy was found to be higher when subjects had to move their eyes as well (dual task) compared to a single-task hand movement. However, this effect was more pronounced for movements to visual targets than to somatosensory targets. A schematic model of sensorimotor transformations for saccadic eye and goal-directed hand movements is proposed and possible shared mechanisms of the two motor systems are discussed.