Dynamic temporal modulation of somatosensory processing during reaching

Abstract

Sensorimotor control of human action integrates feedforward policies that predict future body states with online sensory feedback. These predictions lead to a suppression of the associated feedback signals. Here, we examine whether somatosensory processing throughout a goal-directed movement is constantly suppressed or dynamically tuned so that online feedback processing is enhanced at critical moments of the movement. Participants reached towards their other hand in the absence of visual input and detected a probing tactile stimulus on their moving or static hand. Somatosensory processing on the moving hand was dynamically tuned over the time course of reaching, being hampered in early and late stages of the movement, but, interestingly, recovering around the time of maximal speed. This novel finding of temporal somatosensory tuning was further corroborated in a second experiment, in which larger movement amplitudes shifted the absolute time of maximal speed later in the movement. We further show that the release from suppression on the moving limb was temporally coupled with enhanced somatosensory processing on the target hand. We discuss these results in the context of optimal feedforward control and suggest that somatosensory processing is dynamically tuned during the time course of reaching by enhancing sensory processing at critical moments of the movement.