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Related Experiment Videos

No evidence for accurate visuomotor memory: systematic and variable error in memory-guided reaching.

David A Westwood1, Matthew Heath, Eric A Roy

  • 1School of Health and Human Performance, Dalhousie University, 6230 South Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 3J5 Canada. David.Westwood@dal.ca

Journal of Motor Behavior
|April 25, 2003
PubMed
Summary

The motor system loses accurate aiming information quickly after vision is blocked. This suggests the visuomotor system primarily operates in real-time for precise movements.

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Area of Science:

  • Motor control
  • Human movement science
  • Visuomotor processing

Background:

  • The motor system's ability to retain spatial information after visual occlusion is crucial for accurate movements.
  • Understanding the temporal dynamics of visuomotor feedback is key to explaining real-time motor adjustments.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how long the motor system retains accurate spatial information about a target environment after visual occlusion.
  • To determine if the motor system's performance degrades over time without visual input during reaching tasks.

Main Methods:

  • 14 participants performed reaching movements to midsagittal targets under four visual conditions: open-loop, brief-delay, 500-ms delay, and 2,000-ms delay.
  • The aiming environment was initially viewed for 2,000 ms, followed by varying periods of visual occlusion before movement cueing.

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  • Movement accuracy and endpoint variability were measured to assess spatial information retention.

    • Main Results:

    • Participants overshot targets in the open-loop condition but showed reduced overshooting in all delay conditions.
    • Endpoint variability increased significantly in the delay conditions compared to the open-loop condition.
    • A speed-accuracy tradeoff did not fully account for the observed differences between open-loop and delayed reaching.

    Conclusions:

    • The motor system appears to lose access to highly accurate environmental information rapidly after visual occlusion.
    • These findings support the hypothesis that the visuomotor system operates predominantly in real-time.
    • Motor control relies on immediate visual feedback, with limited capacity for updating spatial representations during delayed visual occlusion.