Online manual movement adjustments in response to target position changes and apparent target motion

This study set out to determine whether the fastest online hand movement corrections are only responses to changing judgments of the targets' position or whether they are also influenced by the apparent target motion. Introducing a gap between when a target disappears and when it reappears at a new position in a double-step paradigm disrupts the apparent motion, so we examined the influence of such a gap on the intensity of the response. We found that responses to target perturbations with disrupted apparent motion were less vigorous. The response latency was 10 ms shorter when there was a gap, which might be related to the gap effect that has previously been described for initiating eye and hand movements.