The influence of visual motion on fast reaching movements to a stationary object

David Whitney (), David A. Westwood and Melvyn A. Goodale
Additional contact information
David Whitney: The University of Western Ontario
David A. Westwood: Dalhousie University
Melvyn A. Goodale: The University of Western Ontario

Nature, 2003, vol. 423, issue 6942, 869-873

Abstract: Abstract One of the most important functions of vision is to direct actions to objects1. However, every time that vision is used to guide an action, retinal motion signals are produced by the movement of the eye and head as the person looks at the object or by the motion of other objects in the scene. To reach for the object accurately, the visuomotor system must separate information about the position of the stationary target from background retinal motion signals—a long-standing problem that is poorly understood2,3,4,5,6,7. Here we show that the visuomotor system does not distinguish between these two information sources: when observers made fast reaching movements to a briefly presented stationary target, their hand shifted in a direction consistent with the motion of a distant and unrelated stimulus, a result contrary to most other findings8,9. This can be seen early in the hand's trajectory (∼120 ms) and occurs continuously from programming of the movement through to its execution. The visuomotor system might make use of the motion signals arising from eye and head movements to update the positions of targets rapidly and redirect the hand to compensate for body movements.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature01693 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:423:y:2003:i:6942:d:10.1038_nature01693

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature01693

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().