Straight ahead acts as a reference for visuomotor adaptation

One can adapt movement planning to compensate for a mismatch between vision and action. Previous research with prismatic lenses has shown this adaptation to be accompanied with a shift in the evaluation of one’s body midline, suggesting an important role of this reference for successful adaptation. This interpretation leads to the prediction that rotation adaptation could be more difficult to learn for some directions than others. Specifically, we hypothesized that targets seen to the right of the body midline but for which a rotation imposes a movement to its left would generate a conflict leading to a bias in movement planning. As expected, we observed different movement planning biases across movement directions. The same pattern of biases was observed in a second experiment in which the starting position was translated 15 cm to the right of the participants’ midline. This indicates that the “straight ahead” direction, not one’s midline, serves as an important reference for movement planning during rotation adaptation.

Luc Proteau (Corresponding author)Email: