ABSTRACT
Neural Control of Movement, 1998


LOCAL PRISM ADAPTATION RESULTS IN A PARALLEL REORGANIZATION OF MOVEMENT PLANNING

Philip N. Sabes

Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA 92037, U.S.A.

Understanding the relationship between posture and movement is of central importance in uncovering how the central nervous system (CNS) plans and executes intentional movement. We address this issue by probing the sensorimotor transformations underlying visually guided movement with local prism-like perturbations of the visual feedback. Participants reached to visual targets with feedback constrained to narrow regions about the target. Perturbing feedback in only one region of space results in a local adaptation in the mapping from target location to arm posture. After this reorganization, corresponding changes were seen in the paths of movements passing through the remapped portions of the workspace when no visual feedback is available. These results support the view the CNS explicitly plans aspects of the movement in the extrinsic (visual) space and that the postural map (inverse kinematics) plays a fundamental role in movement control.

Keywords: motor psychophysics, reaching, obstacle avoidance, optimal control