Driving in the future: temporal visuomotor adaptation and generalization.
Rapid and accurate visuomotor coordination requires tight spatial and temporal sensorimotor synchronization. The introduction of a sensorimotor or intersensory misalignment (either spatial or temporal) impairs performance on most tasks. For more than a century, it has been known that a few minutes of exposure to a spatial misalignment can induce a recalibration of sensorimotor spatial relationships, a phenomenon that may be referred to as spatial visuomotor adaptation. Here, we use a high-fidelity driving simulator to demonstrate that the sensorimotor system can adapt to temporal misalignments on very complex tasks, a phenomenon that we refer to as temporal visuomotor adaptation. We demonstrate that adapting on a single street produces an adaptive state that generalizes to other streets. This shows that temporal visuomotor adaptation is not specific to a single visuomotor transformation, but generalizes across a class of transformations. Temporal visuomotor adaptation is strikingly parallel to spatial visuomotor adaptation, and has strong implications for the understanding of visuomotor coordination and intersensory integration.
Cunningham
D W
DW
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, 72076 Tübingen, Germany. douglas.cunningham@tuebingen.mpg.de
Chatziastros
A
A
von der Heyde
M
M
Bülthoff
H H
HH
D000221:Adaptation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D000222:Adaptation, Physiological; D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D001334:Automobile Driving; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*