Do Visual and Vestibular Inputs Compensate for Somatosensory Loss in the Perception of Spatial Orientation? Insights from a Deafferented Patient

Bringoux L, Scotto di Cesare C, Borel L, Macaluso T, Sarlegna FR. Do Visual and Vestibular Inputs Compensate for Somatosensory Loss in the Perception of Spatial Orientation? Insights from a Deafferented Patient. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2016;10: 181.The present study aimed at investigating the consequences of a massive loss of somatosensory inputs on the perception of spatial orientation. The occurrence of possible compensatory processes for external (i.e., object) orientation perception and self-orientation perception was examined by manipulating visual and/or vestibular cues. To that aim, we compared perceptual responses of a deafferented patient (GL) with respect to age-matched Controls in two tasks involving gravity-related judgments. In the first task, subjects had to align a visual rod with the gravitational vertical (i.e., Subjective Visual Vertical: SVV) when facing a tilted visual frame in a classic Rod-and-Frame Test. In the second task, subjects had to report whether they felt tilted when facing different visuo-postural conditions which consisted in very slow pitch tilts of the body and/or visual surroundings away from vertical. Results showed that, much more than Controls, the deafferented patient was fully dependent on spatial cues issued from the visual frame when judging the SVV. On the other hand, the deafferented patient did not rely at all on visual cues for self-tilt detection. Moreover, the patient never reported any sensation of tilt up to 18 degrees contrary to Controls, hence showing that she did not rely on vestibular (i.e., otoliths) signals for the detection of very slow body tilts either. Overall, this study demonstrates that a massive somatosensory deficit substantially impairs the perception of spatial orientation, and that the use of the remaining sensory inputs available to a deafferented patient differs regarding whether the judgment concerns external vs. self-orientation

Somatosensory Loss Influences the Adoption of Self-Centered Versus Decentered Perspectives

The body and the self are commonly experienced as forming a unity. Experiencing the external world as distinct from the self and the body strongly relies on adopting a single self-centered perspective which results in integrating multisensory sensations into one egocentric body-centered reference frame. Body posture and somatosensory representations have been reported to influence perception and specifically the reference frame relative to which multisensory sensations are coded. In the study reported here, we investigated the role of somatosensory and visual information in adopting self-centered and decentered spatial perspectives. Two deafferented patients who have neither tactile nor proprioceptive perception below the head and a group of age-matched control participants performed a graphesthesia task, consisting of the recognition of ambiguous letters (b, d, p, and q) drawn tactilely on head surfaces. To answer which letter was drawn, the participants can adopt either a self-centered perspective or a decentered one (i.e., centered on a body part or on an external location). The participants’ responses can be used, in turn, to infer the way the left-right and top-bottom letters’ axes are assigned with respect to the left-right and top-bottom axes of their body. In order to evaluate the influence of body posture, the ambiguous letters were drawn on the participants’ forehead, left, and right surfaces of the head, with the head aligned or rotated in yaw relative to the trunk. In order to evaluate the role of external information, the participants completed the task with their eyes open in one session and closed in another one. The results obtained in control participants revealed that their preferred perspective varied with body posture but not with vision. Different results were obtained with the deafferented patients who overall do not show any significant effect of their body posture on their preferred perspective. This result suggests that the orientation of their self is not influenced by their physical body. There was an effect of vision for only one of the two patients. The deafferented patients rely on strategies that are more prone to interindividual differences, which highlights the crucial role of somatosensory information in adopting self-centered spatial perspectives

Proprioceptive loss and the perception, control and learning of arm movements in humans: evidence from sensory neuronopathy

© 2018 The Author(s) It is uncertain how vision and proprioception contribute to adaptation of voluntary arm movements. In normal participants, adaptation to imposed forces is possible with or without vision, suggesting that proprioception is sufficient; in participants with proprioceptive loss (PL), adaptation is possible with visual feedback, suggesting that proprioception is unnecessary. In experiment 1 adaptation to, and retention of, perturbing forces were evaluated in three chronically deafferented participants. They made rapid reaching movements to move a cursor toward a visual target, and a planar robot arm applied orthogonal velocity-dependent forces. Trial-by-trial error correction was observed in all participants. Such adaptation has been characterized with a dual-rate model: a fast process that learns quickly, but retains poorly and a slow process that learns slowly and retains well. Experiment 2 showed that the PL participants had large individual differences in learning and retention rates compared to normal controls. Experiment 3 tested participants’ perception of applied forces. With visual feedback, the PL participants could report the perturbation’s direction as well as controls; without visual feedback, thresholds were elevated. Experiment 4 showed, in healthy participants, that force direction could be estimated from head motion, at levels close to the no-vision threshold for the PL participants. Our results show that proprioceptive loss influences perception, motor control and adaptation but that proprioception from the moving limb is not essential for adaptation to, or detection of, force fields. The differences in learning and retention seen between the three deafferented participants suggest that they achieve these tasks in idiosyncratic ways after proprioceptive loss, possibly integrating visual and vestibular information with individual cognitive strategies

Visual guidance of arm reaching: Online adjustments of movement direction are impaired by amplitude control

International audienc

The influence of visual target information on the online control of movements

International audienceThe continuously changing properties of our environment require constant monitoring of our actions and updating of our motor commands based on the task goals. Such updating relies upon our predictions about the sensory consequences of our movement commands, as well as sensory feedback received during movement execution. Here we focus on how visual information about target location is used to update and guide ongoing actions so that the task goal is successfully achieved. We review several studies that have manipulated vision of the target in a variety of ways, ranging from complete removal of visual target information to changes in visual target properties after movement onset to examine how such changes are accounted for during motor execution. We also examined the specific role of a critical neural structure, the parietal cortex, and argue that a fundamental challenge for the future is to understand how visual information about target location is integrated with other streams of information, during movement execution, to estimate the state of the body and the environment in order to ensure optimal motor performance. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)

Influence of feedback modality on sensorimotor adaptation: Contribution of visual, kinesthetic, and verbal cues

International audienceno abstrac

Delayed Visual Feedback Affects Both Manual Tracking and Grip Force Control When Transporting a Handheld Object

International audienceno abstrac

Handedness Matters for Motor Control But Not for Prediction

Skilled motor behavior relies on the ability to control the body and to predict the sensory consequences of this control. Although there is ample evidence that manual dexterity depends on handedness, it remains unclear whether control and prediction are similarly impacted. To address this issue, right-handed human participants performed two tasks with either the right or the left hand. In the first task, participants had to move a cursor with their hand so as to track a target that followed a quasi-random trajectory. This hand-tracking task allowed testing the ability to control the hand along an imposed trajectory. In the second task, participants had to track with their eyes a target that was self-moved through voluntary hand motion. This eye-tracking task allowed testing the ability to predict the visual consequences of hand movements. As expected, results showed that hand tracking was more accurate with the right hand than with the left hand. In contrast, eye tracking was similar in terms of spatial and temporal gaze attributes whether the target was moved by the right or the left hand. Although these results extend previous evidence for different levels of control by the two hands, they show that the ability to predict the visual consequences of self-generated actions does not depend on handedness. We propose that the greater dexterity exhibited by the dominant hand in many motor tasks stems from advantages in control, not in prediction. Finally, these findings support the notion that prediction and control are distinct processes