Abstract
The present study evaluated the role of eye movements for manual adaptation to reversed vision. Subjects tracked a visual target using a mouse-driven cursor. In Experiment A, they were instructed to look at the target, look at the cursor, fixate straight ahead, or received no instructions regarding eye movements (Groups T, C, F, and N, respectively). Experiment B involved Groups T and C only. In accordance with literature, baseline manual tracking was more accurate when subjects were instructed to move their eyes rather than to fixate straight ahead. In contrast, no such benefit was observed for the adaptive improvement of tracking. We therefore concluded that transfer of information from the oculomotor to the hand motor system enhances the ongoing control of hand movements but not their adaptive modification; probably because the large computational demand of adaptation does not allow an additional processing of supplementary oculomotor signals. We further found adaptation to be worse in T than in any other group. In particular, adaptation was worse in T than in C although eye movements were the same: subjects in both groups moved their eyes in close relationship with the target rather than the cursor, Group C thus disobeying our instructions. The deficient performance of Group T is therefore not related to eye movements per se, but rather to our instructions. We conclude that an independently moving target strongly attracts eye movements independent of instruction (i.e. Groups T and C), but instructions may redirect spatially selective attention (i.e. Group T vs C), and thus influence adaptation.
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Notes
One might argue that the subjects’ gender and age represent confounding factors in our analysis, since they were not equally distributed across the cells of our designs for Exps. A and B. To find out, we replicated all statistical tests in more homogeneous subsamples of our subjects: 9 females of 34–46 years in Exp. A, and 12 females of 19–27 years in Exp. B (of which only 10 had analysable crosscorrelation data). These subsamples yielded the same significance pattern as the original subjects—albeit sometimes at a lower P-level—with the following exceptions: Episode*Group became insignificant in Exps. A and B, leaving only the two main effects significant; Dimension became insignificant for RMSE and crosscorrelation in Exp. B, and was replaced in the former case by a Group*Dimension significance (the Group effect was stronger in one- than in two-dimensional tracking). Thus, the main observations from our original samples were replicated in the subsamples, which supports the robustness of our data and indicates that the findings were not mere artefacts of an unequal age and gender distribution.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by DFG exchange grant (436BUL113/131/0-1), and by DFG operating grant BO 649/8. Thanks are due to Dipl.-Ing. P. Grozdev for software development.
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Grigorova, V., Bock, O. The role of eye movements in visuo-manual adaptation. Exp Brain Res 171, 524–529 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-005-0301-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-005-0301-x