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Related Concept Videos

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Related Experiment Video

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Assessing Corticospinal Excitability During Goal-Directed Reaching Behavior
05:05

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Published on: December 2, 2022

Active inference, attention, and motor preparation.

Harriet Brown1, Karl Friston, Sven Bestmann

  • 1The Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London Queen Square, London, UK.

Frontiers in Psychology
|October 1, 2011
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Attention may play a role in action planning by biasing kinesthetic signals, similar to how it biases visual perception. This study investigated attentional effects on motor preparation and found evidence supporting this mechanism.

Keywords:
action selectionactive inferenceattentionfree energymotor preparationprecisionpriming

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Motor Control
  • Psychology

Background:

  • Perception underpins cognition, belief formation, and action planning.
  • Attention is proposed as a potential mediator between perceptual and cognitive processes.
  • Active inference views motor control as fulfilling predictions of proprioceptive signals.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if action planning (motor preparation) is an attentional phenomenon directed toward kinesthetic signals.
  • To determine if attention biases proprioceptive signals during movement, analogous to exteroceptive biasing.
  • To explore the hierarchical level of attentional effects in motor control.

Main Methods:

  • Adapted the Posner attention paradigm for a motor control setting.
  • Measured reaction times to movements preceded by valid versus invalid cues for movement type and hand effector.
  • Analyzed the interaction between cue validity for movement and effector.

Main Results:

  • Found significant decreases in reaction times with valid relative to invalid cues.
  • Observed a significant interaction between the validity of movement cues and effector cues on reaction times.
  • Reaction time benefits suggest attentional bias occurs at a low level of the motor hierarchy.

Conclusions:

  • Attentional bias in motor preparation appears to be mediated at a low motor hierarchy level, possibly in an intrinsic frame of reference.
  • Findings support the role of attention in enabling top-down predictions of proprioceptive input during movement.
  • The underlying synaptic mechanisms may be shared with those mediating spatial attention in the visual system.