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Flexible strategies for sensory integration during motor planning

Nature Neuroscience volume 8, pages 490–497 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

When planning target-directed reaching movements, human subjects combine visual and proprioceptive feedback to form two estimates of the arm's position: one to plan the reach direction, and another to convert that direction into a motor command. These position estimates are based on the same sensory signals but rely on different combinations of visual and proprioceptive input, suggesting that the brain weights sensory inputs differently depending on the computation being performed. Here we show that the relative weighting of vision and proprioception depends both on the sensory modality of the target and on the information content of the visual feedback, and that these factors affect the two stages of planning independently. The observed diversity of weightings demonstrates the flexibility of sensory integration and suggests a unifying principle by which the brain chooses sensory inputs so as to minimize errors arising from the transformation of sensory signals between coordinate frames.

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Figure 1: Two types of reaching errors induced by shifted visual feedback.
Figure 2: Predicted changes in Experiments 1 and 2.
Figure 3: Data collection and task parameters.
Figure 4: Sample data, Experiment 1.
Figure 5: Group data, Experiment 1.
Figure 6: Model fits, Experiment 1.
Figure 7: Sample and group data, Experiment 2.
Figure 8: Model fits, Experiment 2.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank M. Kurgansky and L. Osborne for helpful comments on the manuscript and H. Gutierrez for technical assistance. This research was supported by a McKnight Scholar Award, the National Eye Institute (R01 EY15679-01A2), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Biomedical Research Support Program grant #5300246 to the UCSF School of Medicine. S.J.S. was supported by a National Science Foundation Fellowship.

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  1. Department of Physiology, W.M. Keck Foundation Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, 94143-0444, California, USA

    Samuel J Sober & Philip N Sabes

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Correspondence to Philip N Sabes.

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Sober, S., Sabes, P. Flexible strategies for sensory integration during motor planning. Nat Neurosci 8, 490–497 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1427

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