Different responses of the right superior temporal sulcus to visual movement feedback during self‐generated vs. externally generated hand movements

Abstract

An important implication of several recent accounts of motor control is that sensory feedback from self-generated movements is relatively attenuated based on predictions issued by the agent's motor system. Such a relative attenuation of sensory information during actions has already been demonstrated in the somatosensory domain. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a virtual reality-based setup to investigate a potential attenuation of brain responses to realistic visual movement feedback during active vs. passive right-hand movements. The participants' right unseen hand was rotated either by the participants themselves or by the experimenter, while the participants received visual movement feedback via a photorealistic virtual 3D hand driven by their real hand movements, or received no visual feedback. We observed a significant interaction between movement type (active vs. passive) and movement feedback (vision vs. no vision) in the right superior temporal sulcus (STS), which showed relatively attenuated blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal differences in movements with vs. without visual feedback when those movements were actively vs. passively executed. This finding suggests that STS activity caused by visual feedback from the moving body may be attenuated based on the agent's motor predictions.

The Perceptual Prediction Paradox

“…The theories have drawn wide support from studies reporting that predictable tactile, auditory and visual inputs evoke lower sensory cortical activation [20,22,23,[26][27][28] and are perceived less intensely [21,[29][30][31], see also 32] than unexpected inputs. The theories are particularly popular in computational neuropsychiatry where aberrant cancellation mechanisms are thought to generate atypicalities in the sense of agency in delusional populations [28,33] by making the (predictable) outcomes of actions appear unusually intense.…”

Waving goodbye to contrast: Self-generated hand movements attenuate visual sensitivity

“…According to the active inference theory, we would expect that without any movement the attenuation would disappear. One could also investigate the role of agency and intention to act by removing the self-generated component and having the experimenter move the hand of the participant (Limanowski et al, 2018). Another way to investigate this would also be to test whether subjects who are less prone to sensory attenuation also exhibit diminished agency judgements.…”

“…Thus, the effect was one of prediction rather than one of visual occlusion. Motor predictions also attenuate brain activity caused by corresponding visual feedback (Limanowski, Sarasso, & Blankenburg, 2018).…”

Active inference under visuo-proprioceptive conflict: Simulation and empirical results

“…This also implicitly minimises exteroceptive prediction error; e.g. the predicted visual action consequences 34,[40][41][42] . Crucially, all ascending prediction errors are precision-weighted based on model predictions (where precision corresponds to the inverse variance), so that a prediction error that is expected to be more precise has a stronger impact on belief updating.…”