Direct effects of prismatic lenses on visuomotor control: an event-related functional MRI study

Exposure to prisms has long been used to explore the control of visually guided actions primarily because adaptation requires the recalibration of misaligned reference frames due to perturbed visual input (i.e. eye-in-head and hand-centered reference frames must be realigned). To date, the only neuroimaging study to explore the direct effects of prisms on pointing used positron emission tomography and found increased activation only in right parietal cortex. We used event-related functional MRI to examine the effects of prisms on visuomanual pointing. Results demonstrated changes in activity in the anterior cingulate, the anterior intraparietal region and in a medial region of the right cerebellum. Specifically, activity in these regions was higher for the first few pointing trials made while viewing targets through prisms when directly contrasted to the last few trials. These results highlight that a more extensive network of cortical and cerebellar regions is involved in recalibrating visuomotor commands in the face of perturbed visual input.