An involuntary muscular response induced by perceived visual errors in hand position

Abstract

The visually induced corrective motor responses of hand position during reaching movements were investigated. Subjects performed reaching movements on a robotic manipulandum where the hand position was presented to the subjects by means of a projected display. On random reaching trials the projected hand position was perturbed relative to the actual hand position while the hand was constrained to the straight line to the target. Electromyographic activity of eight arm muscles were collected. A corrective muscular response starting at 150 ms from the onset of the visual perturbation was found. This response was found to be reflexive in nature and not suppressed by prior instruction. A second study found that the reflexive response was not modified by changes in the background muscle activity level or by the size of the perturbation. The results suggest that the visual system elicits simple motor reflexes in response to visual errors from the expected hand position. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.