Visuomotor learning from postdictive motor error

Abstract
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Abstract

Sensorimotor learning adapts motor output to maintain movement accuracy. For saccadic eye movements, learning also alters space perception, suggesting a dissociation between the performed saccade and its internal representation derived from corollary discharge (CD). This is critical since learning is commonly believed to be driven by CD-based visual prediction error. We estimate the internal saccade representation through pre- and trans-saccadic target localization, showing that it decouples from the actual saccade during learning. We present a model that explains motor and perceptual changes by collective plasticity of spatial target percept, motor command, and a forward dynamics model that transforms CD from motor into visuospatial coordinates. We show that learning does not follow visual prediction error but instead a postdictive update of space after saccade landing. We conclude that trans-saccadic space perception guides motor learning via CD-based postdiction of motor error under the assumption of a stable world.

Data availability

Data will be available at https://zenodo.org upon article acceptance.

Article and author information

Author details

Jana Masselink

Institute for Psychology & Otto Creutzfeldt Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Muenster, Münster, Germany

For correspondence
jana.masselink@uni-muenster.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-5495-8618
Markus Lappe

Institute for Psychology & Otto Creutzfeldt Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Muenster, Münster, Germany

For correspondence
mlappe@uni-muenster.de

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (LA952/8-1)

Markus Lappe

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: All subjects gave written informed consent to participation and publication. The experiment was approved by the ethics committee of the Department of Psychology and Sport Science of the University of Münster (protocol number 2015-21-ML).

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.