To accurately guide one's actions online, the brain predicts sensory action
feedback ahead of time based on internal models, which can be updated by
sensory prediction errors. The underlying operations can be experimentally
investigated in sensorimotor adaptation tasks, in which moving under perturbed
sensory action feedback requires internal model updates. Here we altered
healthy participants’ visual hand movement feedback in a virtual reality
setup, while assessing brain activity with functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI). Participants tracked a continually moving virtual target
object with a photorealistic, three-dimensional (3D) virtual hand controlled
online via a data glove. During the continuous tracking task, the virtual
hand's movements (i.e., visual movement feedback) were repeatedly periodically
delayed, which participants had to compensate for to maintain accurate
tracking. This realistic task design allowed us to simultaneously investigate
processes likely operating at several levels of the brain's motor control
hierarchy. FMRI revealed that the length of visual feedback delay was
parametrically reflected by activity in the inferior parietal cortex and
posterior temporal cortex. Unpredicted changes in visuomotor mapping (at
transitions from synchronous to delayed visual feedback periods or vice versa)
activated biological motion-sensitive regions in the lateral occipitotemporal
cortex (LOTC). Activity in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), focused on the
contralateral anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPS), correlated with tracking
error, whereby this correlation was stronger in participants with higher
tracking performance. Our results are in line with recent proposals of a wide-
spread cortical motor control hierarchy, where temporoparietal regions seem to
evaluate visuomotor congruence and thus possibly ground a self-attribution of
movements, the LOTC likely processes early visual prediction errors, and the
aIPS computes action goal errors and possibly corresponding motor corrections