Sensorimotor effects on central space representation: prism adaptation influences haptic and visual representations in normal subjects

Prism adaptation improves visual and haptic manifestations of left neglect, and can induce a small but reliable simulation of left visual neglect in normal individuals. Here, we present two experiments in which the effects of prism adaptation on the representation of space were explored. In Experiment 1, normal subjects were required to locate the centre of a haptically explored circle, before and after adaptation to leftward displacing prisms. In Experiment 2, a visual circle centring task was used. In both tasks, prism adaptation induced a significant rightward shift of performance. In addition, in both experiments, three classical measures of visuo-manual adaptation were taken: the visual shift, the proprioceptive shift and the total shift. The effects found on the haptic and visual tasks did not correlate with any of these measures. This suggests that the effects of prism adaptation on the circle centring tasks did not depend directly on the sensorimotor consequences of the adaptation. These results imply that prism adaptation can affect noetic levels of space representation in normal subjects, supporting the hypothesis that this low-level sensorimotor intervention can exert a bottom-up structuring influence on higher levels of cognitive integration.