Research Article: Target Uncertainty Mediates Sensorimotor Error Correction

Date Published: January 27, 2017

Publisher: Public Library of Science

Author(s): Luigi Acerbi, Sethu Vijayakumar, Daniel M. Wolpert, Gavin Buckingham.


Human movements are prone to errors that arise from inaccuracies in both our perceptual processing and execution of motor commands. We can reduce such errors by both improving our estimates of the state of the world and through online error correction of the ongoing action. Two prominent frameworks that explain how humans solve these problems are Bayesian estimation and stochastic optimal feedback control. Here we examine the interaction between estimation and control by asking if uncertainty in estimates affects how subjects correct for errors that may arise during the movement. Unbeknownst to participants, we randomly shifted the visual feedback of their finger position as they reached to indicate the center of mass of an object. Even though participants were given ample time to compensate for this perturbation, they only fully corrected for the induced error on trials with low uncertainty about center of mass, with correction only partial in trials involving more uncertainty. The analysis of subjects’ scores revealed that participants corrected for errors just enough to avoid significant decrease in their overall scores, in agreement with the minimal intervention principle of optimal feedback control. We explain this behavior with a term in the loss function that accounts for the additional effort of adjusting one’s response. By suggesting that subjects’ decision uncertainty, as reflected in their posterior distribution, is a major factor in determining how their sensorimotor system responds to error, our findings support theoretical models in which the decision making and control processes are fully integrated.

Partial Text

Sensorimotor tasks typically involve both estimating the state of the world (e.g., target and limb positions) and controlling actions so as to achieve goals. Two major frameworks, Bayesian estimation and stochastic optimal feedback control (OFC), have emerged to explain how the sensorimotor system estimates uncertain states and controls its actions. Together these frameworks have provided a normative account of human motor coordination which is able to account for a range of behavioral phenomena, including how humans correct for perturbations of various kind in fast directed movements. Here we will investigate the relation between estimation and online control.

We used a task in which we could control the uncertainty of the location of a target (the center of mass) and examine the extent to which subjects corrected for perturbations of their reach to indicate the target location. We found that target uncertainty significantly affected subjects’ error correction strategy for perturbations of the visual feedback on a trial-by-trial basis, but in such a way that the overall performance would not be hindered. That is, subjects almost fully corrected for the perturbation when target uncertainty was low but only partially corrected when the target uncertainty was high.




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