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Predictive interception across speed profiles
Inmaculada Márquez1,2,3, Mario Treviño1
1Laboratorio De Plasticidad Cortical y Aprendizaje Perceptual, Instituto De Neurociencias, Universidad De Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.
Frontiers in Neural Circuits
|July 28, 2026
Summary
Predictive interception adapts to changing target speeds, relying on velocity-based predictions that incorporate higher-order motion information. Performance degrades with nonlinear target dynamics, especially when visual feedback is removed.
Area of Science:
- Human motor control
- Perception-action coupling
- Predictive processing
Background:
- Visuomotor interception relies on predicting target motion to overcome sensorimotor delays.
- Previous research primarily focused on constant target speeds, leaving adaptation to varying speeds unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how human observers adapt visuomotor interception to different target speed profiles (constant, linear-ramp, nonlinear).
- To determine the role of internal motion estimates when visual feedback is temporarily removed.
Main Methods:
- Participants performed interception tasks with targets exhibiting constant, linear-ramp, and nonlinear speed variations.
- Eye and hand movements were recorded; visual feedback was masked on a subset of trials.
- Pupillometry was used to explore cognitive load and attentional modulation.
Main Results:
- Interception performance remained dependent on target speed (vT) even without visual feedback, but was constrained by the temporal evolution of vT.
- Removing visual feedback increased spatial errors, particularly for nonlinear motion profiles.
- Oculomotor measures were more sensitive to kinematic variations than manual control, suggesting dissociable effector systems.
- Internal representations are velocity-dominated but incorporate higher-order kinematic information.
Conclusions:
- Predictive interception utilizes velocity-dominated representations that are sensitive to higher-order kinematic information.
- This predictive mechanism allows robust performance for simple motion but has limitations with complex, nonlinear target dynamics.
- The findings highlight the sophisticated predictive capabilities of the human sensorimotor system and its constraints.
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