Movement planning of video and of manual aiming movements

We studied aiming performance of adults for video- and manual aiming tasks when they had visual information about the location of the starting base or when they had not. In video-aiming, foveating the starting base and then the target prior to movement initiation (Foveation) resulted in less aiming bias and variability than when the starting base was not visible (PNV), or visible without the participants foveating it prior to movement initiation (PSV). In manual aiming, Foveation and PSV procedures resulted in identical results but reduced aiming bias and variability in comparison to the PNV procedures. The results indicate that participants had difficulty in transforming the locations of the starting base and of the target when seen on a vertical screen into an appropriate movement trajectory. Successive foveation of the starting base and of the target facilitated this transformation, resulting in direction variability being reduced by more than half in comparison to the PNV and PSV conditions. This suggests that in video-aiming the efference copy of the saccade can be used by the CNS to approximate the hand trajectory in the workspace and/or in joint coordinates (Jouffrais and Boussaoud, 1999). Hand trajectory could be readily available in manual aiming if the target location can be recoded directly in hand-coordinates as recently suggested by Buneo et al. (2002).