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Reflex Activity

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A reflex activity is an automatic, involuntary response to specific stimuli. It is a part of our survival mechanism, designed to protect us from potential harm. For example, when a bright light suddenly shines into our eyes, we instinctively close them or look away. This is a simple reflex activity orchestrated by the nervous system without conscious thought or effort.
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Neuroplasticity reflects the brain's remarkable capacity to adapt and evolve, responding dynamically to learning, experiences, or injury by reorganizing its neural circuitry. This reorganization involves creating new neural connections and refining old ones through a series of biological processes that contribute to the brain's lifelong development and adaptability.

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 26, 2026

Visualizing Visual Adaptation

Visualizing Visual Adaptation

Published on: April 24, 2017

Specificity of reflex adaptation for task-relevant variability.

David W Franklin¹, Daniel M Wolpert

¹Computational and Biological Learning Laboratory, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1PZ, UK. dwf25@cam.ac.uk

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|December 26, 2008

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

The motor system adapts reflexes based on task relevance. Reflexes increase with task-relevant visual discrepancies and decrease with task-irrelevant ones, showing sensitivity to environmental statistics.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Motor Control
Human Physiology

Background:

The motor system utilizes reflexes like the vestibulo-ocular reflex and stretch reflex to respond to environmental changes.
These reflexes exhibit adaptive gains in response to both novel and fixed environmental alterations.

Purpose of the Study:

To demonstrate and investigate a reflex response to visual location shifts during reaching movements.
To explore how the magnitude of this reflex depends on the statistical properties of visuomotor discrepancies.

Main Methods:

Examined reflex responses to two distributions of visuomotor discrepancies with zero mean and equal variance.
Differentiated between task-relevant (persistent) and task-irrelevant (transient) discrepancies.
Assessed reflex magnitude using identical probe trials under both discrepancy conditions.

Main Results:

Observed opposite adaptation directions for reflex magnitudes based on discrepancy relevance.
Demonstrated increased reflex magnitudes for task-relevant variability.
Showed decreased reflex magnitudes for task-irrelevant variability.

Conclusions:

Reflex magnitudes can be modulated even without fixed environmental changes.
Motor reflexes are sensitive to the statistical properties of tasks.
Modulation depends critically on whether environmental variability is task-relevant or task-irrelevant.