title: A dedicated binding mechanism for the visual control of movement.
abstract: The human motor system is remarkably proficient in the online control of visually guided movements, adjusting to changes in the visual scene within 100 ms [1-3]. This is achieved through a set of highly automatic processes [4] translating visual information into representations suitable for motor control [5, 6]. For this to be accomplished, visual information pertaining to target and hand need to be identified and linked to the appropriate internal representations during the movement. Meanwhile, other visual information must be filtered out, which is especially demanding in visually cluttered natural environments. If selection of relevant sensory information for online control was achieved by visual attention, its limited capacity [7] would substantially constrain the efficiency of visuomotor feedback control. Here we demonstrate that both exogenously and endogenously cued attention facilitate the processing of visual target information [8], but not of visual hand information. Moreover, distracting visual information is more efficiently filtered out during the extraction of hand compared to target information. Our results therefore suggest the existence of a dedicated visuomotor binding mechanism that links the hand representation in visual and motor systems.
authors.affiliation: Motor Control Group, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London WC1N 3AR, UK. Electronic address: a.reichenbach@ucl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Alexandra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Reichenbach
authors.affiliation: Computational and Biological Learning Lab, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1PZ, UK.
authors.forename: David W
authors.initials: DW
authors.lastname: Franklin
authors.affiliation: Motor Control Group, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London WC1N 3AR, UK.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zatka-Haas
authors.affiliation: Motor Control Group, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London WC1N 3AR, UK.
authors.forename: Jörn
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Diedrichsen
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D025461:Feedback, Physiological; D006225:Hand; D006801:Humans; D009068:Movement; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D014796:Visual Perception